Pablo Neruda

Born Ricardo Eliecer Neftali Reyes Basoalto on July 12, 1904, in Parral, a small town in central Chile, Neruda began writing poetry at thirteen and adopted his pen name as a teenager, partly to hide his literary pursuits from his disapproving father, a railway worker. By twenty he had published Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924), a collection of erotic, melancholy verse that made him famous across the Spanish-speaking world while still a university student in Santiago. He entered the Chilean diplomatic service and spent years in Asia, serving as consul in Rangoon, Colombo, and Batavia, where loneliness and colonial decay seeped into the surrealist darkness of Residence on Earth (1933). His politics sharpened during the Spanish Civil War, and Canto General (1950), a sweeping epic of the Americas in over fifteen thousand lines, cemented his reputation as a poet of hemispheric ambition. A member of the Chilean Communist Party, Neruda was elected to the Senate, then forced into hiding and exile when the party was outlawed in 1948; he escaped over the Andes on horseback. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. Two years later, hospitalized with prostate cancer during the military coup that killed his friend Salvador Allende, Neruda died at his seaside home in Isla Negra on September 23, 1973, under circumstances the Chilean government later acknowledged were "clearly possible and highly likely" to have involved foul play.

In 1939, as special consul in Paris, Neruda chartered an old cargo ship, the Winnipeg, meant to carry two hundred and fifty passengers. He crammed it with over two thousand refugees fleeing Franco's Spain, reuniting families split by internment camps, and sailed them to Chile. He called it the noblest work of his life.