CESAR VALLEJO BIOGRAPHY

Cesar Vallejo was born on March 16th in 1892 in La Libertad, Santiago de Chuco a remote village in the Andes of Peru. He studied literature in the Universidad de la Libertad in Trujillo. The poet dropped out of the university several times, working at a sugar plantation where he saw firsthand the exploitation of agrarian workers, a sight that would influence his politics and aesthetics. Vallejo received a masters degree in Spanish literature in 1915. Later, Vallejo moved to Lima, where he lived a Bohemian lifestyle, meeting important members of the intellectual left, and working as a tutor and then a professor. The poet suffered a number of calamities in the years leading up to the publication of Los Heraldos Negros: He lost his teaching post after having refusing to marry a woman with whom he had an affair, his lover died of a failed abortion which he had forced her to undergo, his mother died in 1920, and he was imprisoned for 105 days after returning home to Santiago de Chuco and igniting a scandal there. After publishing Trilce in 1923, the poet, having lost another professorship in Lima, emigrated to Europe, where he lived until his death in Paris in 1938. He is interred in the Cimetire du Montparnasse.