Octavio Paz

Mexico's first Nobel Prize winner in literature (1990), Paz's El Laberinto de la Soledad — The Labyrinth of Solitude — is the most influential single text in the definition of Mexican national identity and character, and its concept of the fiesta as Mexican psychological compensation for historical trauma remains the most-cited framework for understanding Mexican cultural psychology. Paz's combination of poetry, political philosophy, and cultural anthropology made him the most intellectually formidable Mexican writer of the 20th century.