Background
TORRES BODET, Jaime was born on April 17, 1902 in Mexico City, Mexico.
Tomb of Jaime Torres Bodet in the Panteon Civil Dolores cemetery in Mexico City
Young Jaime Torres Bodet
TORRES BODET, Jaime was born on April 17, 1902 in Mexico City, Mexico.
In 1921 Jaime Torres Bodet was appointed personal secretary of the great writer Joseph Vasconcelos. In 1922, he was appointed as a head of the Department of Libraries, Ministry of Education, a position he held until 1924. From 1925 to 1928 he was a Professor of French literature at the University of Mexico. In 1929 he started his career in politics in the Foreign Service, holding the position of secretary in the Mexican Legation in Madrid and Paris. In 1934 he returned to America and was working in Buenos Aires and, the following year, again crossed the Atlantic and became first secretary of the Embassy of Mexico in France. After Mexican period, during which he held in 1936 and 1937, the head of the Diplomatic Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, became charge d'affaires in Belgium (1938) and again in Mexico, Secretary of Public Education between 1943 and 1946, a position from which promoted the National Campaign Against Illiteracy (1944-1946), established the Federal Committee of the School Construction Program (1945) and founded the National Institute of Teacher Training. Then took over in 1946, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, representing Mexico on the first American Conference of Quintandinha (Brazil, 1947), which established the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, and then, in the Ninth International Conference of American Bogota (1948), which adopted the Charter of the Organization of American States. In 1948, his diplomatic career found an international endorsement when he was elected to the post of director general of the United Nations Educational and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). He was direstor general until 1952. As Minister of Education, Torres Bodet was working from 1959 till 1964. He elborated the Eleven-Year Plan for the Extension and Improvement of Primary Education, and launched the system of free textbooks, creating, first thirty centers of Industrial Work Training, which represented a major boost for vocational training in Mexico. He chaired the Academy of Fine Arts in 1966 and 1967. Jaime Torres was the member of the Mexican Academy of Language, The National College, the Institute of France and the Academy of Mundo Latino, was awarded an honorary doctorate by the universities of Albuquerque, Bordeaux , Brussels, Havana, Lima, Lyon, Merida, Mexico, Paris, Sinaloa and Southern California, in 1966 received the National Prize for Literature.
Fervor (1918)
The delirious heart (1922)
Songs (1922)
The House (1923)
Day (1923)
New Songs (1923)
Poems (1924)
Screen (1925)
Poems (1926)
Contemporaries (1928)
Exile (1930)
Star Day (1933)
Crypt (1937)
Sonnets (1949)
Borders (1954)
No truce (1957)
Sandy Time (1955)
Balzac (1959)
Tolstoy (1965)
Rubén Darío (1966)
Proust (1967)
Memories (five volumes) (1961)
The Birth of Venus and Other Stories (1941)