1904

Pablo Neruda was born on 12 July as Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (he was known as Neftalí Reyes) in Parral (meaning vine arbour) in central Chile. His mother died of TB two months after his birth, on 14 September.

1906

His train guard father remarried in Temuco where Neruda was brought up by a step-mother he nicknamed Mamadre.

1910

The family settled in Temuco. The geography of the area, with its forests, wind, rain and Pacific coast, imbued Neruda's sensibility and poetry. As an adolescent, he was very shy, skinny, solitary and an omnivorous reader. He went to the Liceo de Niños. He wrote vividly of these years in his posthumous memoirs, Confieso que he vivido. Memorias, 1974.

1917

Published his first piece (in prose) titled ‘Entusiasmo y perseverancia’.

1919

Gabriela Mistral, Chile's earlier Nobel Prize winner in 1945, appointed head of the Liceo de Niñas in Temuco. She encouraged him to read Russian fiction.

1920

He began using the nom de plume Pablo Neruda on a school exercise book (see text for more on this choice).

1921

In March, travelled to Santiago de Chile to study to be a teacher of French at the Instituto Pedagógico, but never finished his degree. There are references in poems to his boarding house on Calle Maruri, 513.

1922

T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land, James Joyce Ulysses and César Vallejo Trilce.

1923

Published his first book of poems, Crepusculario.

1924

Published his Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada. Over these Santiago years, he lived as a poet and associated with anarchists and their magazine Claridad. Neruda protected his lovers’ identity, first by calling the two (at least) women of his poems Marisol and Marisombra; then, posthumously, biographers linked them to Teresa Vázquez and Albertina Rosa Azócar, the great love of his early life. In fact, in 1932, he still hoped to elope with her, though both were married. André Breton published the collectively signed first surrealist manifesto in Paris.

1925

Accompanied his friend Rubén Azócar on a teaching post to Ancud on Chiloe island, some 1100 kilometres south of Santiago. Started writing the early poems of Residencia en la tierra.