This Chilean poet, and diplomat, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. His original name was Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, but he used the pen name Pablo Neruda for over 20 years before adopting it legally in 1946. Neruda is the most widely read of the Spanish American poets. From the 1940s on, his works reflected the political struggle of the left and the socio-historical developments in South America. He also wrote love poems. Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924) have sold over a million copies since it first appeared.

Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto was born in Parral, a small town in central Chile. His father, don José del Carmen Reyes Morales, was a poor railway worker and his mother, Rosa Basoalto de Reyes, was a schoolteacher, who died of tuberculosis when Neruda was an infant. Don José Carmen moved with his sons in 1906 to Temuco, and married Trinidad Candia Marvedre. Neruda started to write poetry when he was ten years old. At the age of 12 he met the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral (Literature Nobel 1945), who encouraged his literary efforts. The American poet Walt Whitman, whose framed portrait Neruda later kept on his table, become a major influence on his work. "I, a poet who writes in Spanish, learned more from Walt Whitman than from Cervantes," Neruda said in 1972 in a speech during a visit in the United States.

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