220px pablo neruda 1963

Pablo Neruda

By CindyG

  • Pablo Neruda was born

    Pablo Neruda was born
    Pablo Neruda was born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto on 12 July 1904, in Parral, Chile, a city in Linares Province, now part of the greater Maule Region, some 350 km south of Santiago,[6] to José del Carmen Reyes Morales, a railway employee, and Rosa Basoalto, a schoolteacher who died two months after he was born.

  • Writing Against Odds

    Writing Against Odds
    Neruda's father opposed his son's interest in writing and literature, but he received encouragement from others, including the future Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral, who headed the local school. On July 18, 1917, at the age of thirteen, he published his first work, an essay titled "Entusiasmo y perseverancia" ("Enthusiasm and Perseverance") in the local daily newspaper La Mañana, and signed it Neftalí Reyes.

  • Exile

    Exile
    Once out of Chile, he spent the next three years in exile. In Buenos Aires, Neruda took advantage of the slight resemblance between him and his friend, the future Nobel Prize-winning novelist to the Guatemalan embassy Miguel Ángel Asturias, to travel to Europe using Asturias' passport. Pablo Picasso arranged his entrance into Paris and Neruda made a surprise appearance there to a stunned World Congress of Peace Forces

  • PEN Conference

    PEN Conference
    In 1966, Neruda was invited to attend an International PEN conference in New York City.[41] Officially, he was barred from entering the U.S. because he was a communist, but the conference organizer, playwright Arthur Miller, eventually prevailed upon the Johnson Administration to grant Neruda a visa.[41] Neruda gave readings to packed halls, and even recorded some poems for the Library of Congress.[41]

  • Nerudas Death

    Nerudas Death
    It was originally reported that, on the evening of September 23, 1973, at Santiago's Santa María Clinic, Neruda had died of heart failure However, “(t)hat day, he was alone in the hospital where he had already spent five days. His health was declining and he called his wife, Matilde Urrutia, so she could come immediately because they were giving him something and he wasn’t feeling good.