ABSTRACT
ItIn the many travels of Octavio Paz, it would seem that most roads led if not to, then at least through, Paris. He first visited in 1937, on his way to and from Spain, as youngest of three Mexican delegates to second International Congress of Writers in Defense of Culture. Paz achieved his first major work as a cultural critic, The Labyrinth of Solitude during 1950. He saw the book as belonging to the French moralist tradition, by its analysis of certain Mexican attitudes placed within a historical and universal context. Despite material deprivations experienced in French capital after the German occupation, he found rich cultural milieu that shaped him artistically and intellectually for rest of his life. Paz next lived in Paris as a diplomat between 1959 and 1962, before being named Mexican ambassador to India. Paz continued to visit Paris in later years, where nearly all his books were translated and some even appeared first in French.
