Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904 Ô[][] September 23, 1973) was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet, diplomat and politician Neftal├¡ Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. He chose his pen name after Czech poet Jan Neruda. Neruda became known as a poet while still a teenager. He wrote in a variety of styles including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and erotically-charged love poems such as the ones in his 1924 collection Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair. In 1971 Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Colombian novelist Gabriel Garc├¡a M├írquez once called him "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language." Neruda always wrote in green ink as it was his personal color of hope. On July 15, 1945, at Pacaembu Stadium in S├úo Paulo, Brazil, he read to 100,000 people in honor of Communist revolutionary leader Lu├¡s Carlos Prestes. During his lifetime, Neruda occupied many diplomatic positions and served a stint as a senator for the Chilean Communist Party. When Conservative Chilean President Gonz├ílez Videla outlawed communism in Chile in 1948, a warrant was issued for Neruda's arrest. Friends hid him for months in a house basement in the Chilean port of Valpara├¡so. Later, Neruda escaped into exile through a mountain pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina. Years later, Neruda was a close collaborator to socialist President Salvador Allende. When Neruda returned to Chile after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Allende invited him to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people.