Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel García Márquez: Biography

Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez was born on March 6, 1927, in the Colombian river town of Aracataca.

García Márquez‘s Childhood and Early Life

The oldest of twelve children, García Márquez was nicknamed Gabo or Gabito by his family and close friends. When he was still a baby, his parents moved to another Colombian city, leaving young García Márquez in the care of his maternal grandparents. Both of his grandparents significantly influenced García Márquez in his early life. His grandfather was a well-respected veteran of the Colombian civil war known as the Thousand Days War and imparted many life lessons to the young García Márquez.

Both of his grandparents were wonderful, if very different, storytellers. His grandfather told young García Márquez about history, the war, and problems with the United Fruit Company and local banana plantations. On the other hand, his grandmother was a superstitious woman who believed strongly in ghosts, spirits, and the supernatural and filled her stories to that effect.

In 1937, García Márquez moved back with his parents to the town of Sucre, where he started attending school. He enjoyed writing poetry and drawing comic strips, and some of his poems were published in his high school’s newspaper.

García Márquez later received a government scholarship and moved to Bogotá, Colombia, to complete his high school education.

García Márquez’s Adulthood

García Márquez graduated high school in 1947 and enrolled in the National University of Colombia, where he studied law while nursing a growing interest in writing. The following year massive riots and the assassination of a popular left-wing politician forced García Márquez’s university to close. He transferred to the University of Cartagena and began his first job in journalism.

Fig 2: García Márquez's first writing work was in journalism.

In 1950, García Márquez left the university for good to focus on his journalism career. For the next several years, he worked as a reporter for various newspapers and became a member of the Barranquilla Group, a loose association of writers and journalists who introduced García Márquez to literature that would influence him throughout his career.

García Márquez's collected works of journalism span three volumes and more than 3,000 pages. In 1955, he became famous in Colombia for a series of interviews published in the newspaper El Espectador with the sole survivor of a shipwreck. The Colombian government officially announced that the ship sank in a storm, but García Márquez uncovered that the ship actually sank because it was overloaded with illegal goods from the United States. This work was later compiled and published as The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor in 1970.

García Márquez’s Politics and Criticism

Gabriel García Márquez was a staunch leftist and socialist throughout his life. He was, sometimes controversially, close friends with Cuban president Fidel Castro and was denied a visa to the United States for some years because of his outspoken opposition to US imperialist policies.

García Márquez’s Literary Career

García Márquez’s first two novels, Leaf Storm (1955) and In Evil Hour (1962) were published with little to note. In 1967, however, García Márquez’s third novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, was published and almost immediately hailed as one of the greatest books of the twentieth century. The novel was translated into English by Gregory Rabassa in 1970 and went on to sell more than fifty million copies. It is without a doubt García Márquez’s best-known work; it led to numerous literary prizes and cemented him as one of the great novelists of the century.

Over the next 37 years, Gabriel García Márquez would go on to publish a multitude of other books. Some of the most notable include Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985).

In 1982, García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his body of work. He was only the fourth Latin American writer ever to receive the prize.

García Márquez’s End of Life and Death

Gabriel García Márquez moved to Mexico City in 1961 and lived there on and off for the rest of his life. In 1999, the writer’s health began to decline. He was diagnosed and successfully treated for lymphatic cancer, which inspired him to begin writing a memoir. Living to Tell the Tale, the first of a proposed trilogy of memoirs, was published in 2002. His final work of fiction, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, was published two years later in 2004.

Gabriel García Márquez died of pneumonia on April 17, 2014, in Mexico City. He was 87 years old.

Gabriel García Márquez and Magical Realism

Gabriel García Márquez is perhaps best known for pioneering the use of magical realism in literature. As its name states, magical realism is a style of writing based on reality but which uses magical or fantastical elements. Importantly, these elements are included in the story as if they were also real; they are not treated as unusual or remarkable in any way.

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, for example, the entire town of Macondo suddenly comes down with a sickness that prevents them from sleeping. As a result of this sickness, the residents begin to lose their memory, and they must label everything in the town so as not to forget the names of things.

García Márquez would often claim that there was nothing fantastical about his writing; he was simply describing the reality of Latin America. His style of storytelling was also strongly influenced by his grandmother, who would recount tales of ghosts and the supernatural as if they were real.

Gabriel García Márquez: Books

Fig 3: One Hundred Years of Solitude takes place in an imaginary town called Macondo. However, Macondo has many similarities with Aracataca and many other Colombian towns.

• One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is Gabriel García Márquez’s most famous novel and one of the most important literary works of the twentieth century. It tells the multigenerational story of the Buendía family and the founding of the fictional town of Macondo. García Márquez was inspired by his childhood and the storytelling of both his grandparents. There are various events in One Hundred Years of Solitude that allude to important moments in Colombian history, and Macondo is thought to be based on García Márquez’s hometown of Aracataca. One Hundred Years of Solitude is often cited as one of the best examples of the genre of magical realism.

• Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) is perhaps Gabriel García Márquez’s best-known novel after One Hundred Years of Solitude. It tells of a decades-long love story between Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza. The two meet as children, but life pulls the lovers in different directions and they find each other again after 50 years. The novel was adapted into a movie in 2006.

• García Márquez’s other novels include In Evil Hour (1962), The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), The General in His Labyrinth (1989), Of Love and Other Demons (1994), and Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004).

• Gabriel García Márquez is also known for his short stories, including the classic example of magical realism, "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings."

• Also noteworthy is the non-fiction The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (1970). Originally published in fourteen instalments in the newspaper El Espectador in 1955, this is an example of García Márquez’s journalistic work. It tells the story of a survivor of a real shipwreck in the 1950s.

Gabriel García Márquez: Quotes

The opening line from One Hundred Years of Solitude is among the most iconic first sentences in literary history. In just one incredibly compelling sentence, García Márquez alludes to the expanse of time the novel will cover and the strange way in which time often moves in Macondo. The childlike sense of wonder associated with the discovery of ice suggests the magical realism that will permeate the rest of the novel.

Memory, ageing, and the passage of time are important themes in García Márquez’s work. Many of his novels, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, span long periods of time, decades or more, and examine how the passage of time changes places, people, and relationships. Writing stories with such long timelines allows García Márquez to explore the insights gained over a lifetime and allows characters to reflect on their own development.

Gabriel García Márquez’s short story "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" is one of the most often cited examples of magical realism. This opening passage introduces the first truly fantastical element of the story, the old man’s enormous wings. But even before that, there are many details in the text that convey a sense of strangeness. The profusion of crabs, for example, or the personification of the sad world, or the sea that has "become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish." However, at the same time, the entire passage is narrated in the same, matter-of-fact, realistic prose that is exemplary of magical realism.

Gabriel García Márquez’s Nobel banquet speech, titled the "Solitude of Latin America", eloquently describes the history of Latin America in a way that highlights the outside view of the region as a strange and magical place. This assumption, however, has led to all aspects of Latin American existence appearing unbelievable to the outside observer, including the social unrest and political upheaval occurring in the region during the period of García Márquez’s Nobel speech. Latin America is left in solitude because their problems are accepted as part of their madness. However, this history has also created an entire region of writers and artists that cannot use European models to explain their reality.

Gabriel García Márquez: Accomplishments

• In 1972, Gabriel García Márquez won the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
• Additionally, in 1972, One Hundred Years of Solitude was awarded the Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize.
• In 1980 Gabriel García Márquez was awarded the Common Wealth Award of Distinguished Service for Outstanding Achievement in Literature.
• In 1982 Gabriel García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.