Nobel Prize Laureate Author. Anthropologist Octavio Paz, a Mexican author, received the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature according to the Nobel committee, "for impassioned writing with wide horizons, characterized by sensuous intelligence and humanistic integrity." His masterpiece was the 1950 "The Labyrinth of Solitude," a collection of essays in which he analyzes Mexican history and culture. Born into a literary environment, he grandfather was an author and had a massive library. In his teens, he founded an avant-garde magazine, "Barandal," and published his first book of poems, "Luna Silvestre," in 1933. He studied law, literature, and anthropology at the National University, but refused to accept his degree. During the Spanish Civil War, from 1937 to 1938, he fought with the Republicans. In the late 1930s and in the 1940s he worked as a journalist. In 1944 Paz received a Guggenheim Fellowship for travel and studies at the University of California at Berkeley. During World War II in 1944, he joined the Mexican Diplomatic Corps, he served as ambassador in Paris, Japan, Switzerland, the United States and India, serving also as Mexico's representative to UNESCO. In 1968, Paz resigned his diplomatic post as ambassador to India in protest over the student massacre in Tlateloco prior to the Olympic Games. From 1968 to 1970, he was a visiting professor of Spanish American Literature at the Universities of Texas, Austin, Pittsburg and Pennsylvania. He taught at Cambridge in 1969, was the Simón Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies in 1970, Fellow of Churchill College from 1970 to 1971, and he held the Charles Eliot Norton Chair of Poetry at Harvard University from 1971 to 1972. From 1971 to 1976 Paz was editor of the "Plural", and from 1976 he edited the "Vuelta". In 1977 he was awarded the Jerusalem Literature Prize and the Premio Nacional de Letras; in 1981 was awarded the Cervantes Award; in 1982 received the prestigious Neustadt Prize; in 1984 the German booksellers Peace Prize; in 1985 the Oslo Poetry Prize; in 1987 Spain's Menedez Pelayo Prize; and in 1990 the Nobel Prize for Literature. Of the three Mexican citizens, who have received the Nobel Prize, Octavio Paz was the first Mexican citizen to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Among educational institutions that awarded him honorary degrees are Boston University in 1973, University of Mexico in 1978, Harvard University in 1980, and New York University in 1984. He published over 40 books during his lifetime and they have been translated into many languages.