Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in Aracataca (Magdalena), 6 March 1927. He grew up as only child between her maternal grandparents and aunts, as their parents, the telegraph Gabriel Eligio García and Luisa Santiaga Marquez went to live, when Gabriel had only five years, the population of Sucre, where Mr. Gabriel Eligio mounted a pharmacy where they had most of her eleven children.

The grandparents were two very particular character and marked the journey of the future Nobel literature: Colonel Nicolas Marquez, a veteran of the War of a Thousand Days, I told the little Gabriel countless stories of his youth and civil wars of the nineteenth century took him to the circus and the cinema and was its umbilical cord with the history and reality. Dona Tranquilina Iguaran, Blinkin his grandmother, he spent his always telling family tales and legends, while organizing the lives of household members according to the messages received in dreams: she was the source of the magical view, superstitious and supernatural of reality. Among her aunts who most marked was Francesco, who wove his own cloth to end his life.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez learned to write in the five years in Aracataca Montessori school, the young and beautiful teacher Rosa Elena Fergusson, who is in love: it was the first woman to upset him. Every time I approached him, he felt like kissing: it instilled the pleasure of going to school, only to see her, as well as the timeliness and write one page without draft.

In the school remained until 1936 when the grandfather died and had to go live with his parents to savanna and river port of Sucre, which he left to study in school internal San Jose, Barranquilla, where at the age of ten years wrote poetry and humor. In 1940, thanks to a scholarship, he entered the boarding Zipaquira Lyceum, a really traumatic experience: the cold the boarding of the City of Salt made him sad. Always remained a large bag of wool, and never took his hands out of his sleeves, because he was terrified of the cold.

However stories, fables and legends told him by his grandparents, joined a life experience that would later become the subject of novel after receiving the Nobel prize: the course of the Magdalena river steamboat. In Zipaquira he studied literature, between 1944 and 1946, Carlos Hermida Julio Calderon, who in 1955, when he published The litter , presented him with the following inscription: “To my teacher Carlos Hermida Julio Calderon, who took it into head that thing that I write. ” Eight months before delivery of the Nobel, in the column published in fifteen newspapers around the world, Garcia Marquez Calderon stated that Hermida was “the ideal teacher of literature.”

In student years in Zipaquira, Gabriel Garcia Marquez spent his time painting cats, donkeys and roses, and making caricatures of the rector and other classmates. In 1945 he wrote some sonnets and poems inspired by a girlfriend octosyllabic had: they are one of the few attempts of the writer to versification. In 1946 he graduated from high school with excellent grades..

Law Student

In 1947, pressured by his parents, he moved to Bogota to study law at the National University where he studied under Alfonso Lopez Michelsen and where he became friends with Camilo Torres Restrepo. The capital went to García Márquez city in the world (and knows almost all) that most impressed him, it was a gray city, cool, where everyone dressed in warm clothing and black. As in Zipaquirá, García Márquez came to feel like a stranger in a country other than their own: Bogota was then “a colonial city of people (…) introverted and quiet, just the opposite to the Caribbean, where people felt the presence of other beings phenomenal but they were not there. ”

The study of law was not really his passion, but he managed to consolidate its vocation as a writer, since the September 13, 1947 she published her first story, The third resignation , in the supplement Weekend 80, El Espectador, led by Eduardo Zalamea Borda (Ulysses), who in the presentation of the story wrote that Garcia Marquez was the new genius of Colombian literature, the illustrations in the story were made by Hernan Merino. A few weeks later, a second story: Eva is in a cat .

At the National University stayed only until April 9, 1948, as a result of Bogotazo, the University was closed indefinitely. Garcia Marquez lost a lot of books and manuscripts in the fire at the boarding-house and was forced to seek transfer to the University of Cartagena, where a student remained irregular. Never graduated, but started a newspaper of their main activities: the columnist.Manuel Zapata Olivella got him a daily column in the newly founded the newspaper El Universal.

Barranquilla Group

In the early forties began to take shape in Barranquilla a kind of association of friends of literature called the Group of Barranquilla, his head was Don Ramón Vinyes leadership. The wise Catalonian, owner of a bookstore that sold the best of Spanish literature, Italian, French and English, guided the group in reading, analyzing authors, works dismounted and reassembled, allowing discovery the tricks that were served novelists. The other head was José Félix Fuenmayor, who proposed the topics and taught the budding young writers Alvaro Cepeda Samudio, and Germain Alfonso Fuenmayor Vargas, among others) how to avoid falling into folkloric.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was linked to that group. At first route from Cartagena to Barranquilla whenever he could.Then, thanks to a pneumonia that forced him to retreat to Sucre, he changed his work in El Universal on a daily column in El Heraldo de Barranquilla, which appeared in January 1950 under the heading of “giraffe” and signed “Septimus”.

In the Barranquilla newspaper worked Cepeda Samudio, Vargas and Fuentes. Garcia Marquez wrote, read and discussed every day with the three editors, the inseparable quartet met daily in the library of “wise Catalan” or went to cafes to drink beer and rum until the wee hours of the morning. Polemic literature to scream hurt, or their own work, the four read. Made the dissection of the works of Defoe, Dos Passos, Camus, Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, writer latter has great influence on the fiction of Latin America and especially in that of Garcia Marquez, as he himself acknowledged in his famous speech “Solitude of Latin America”, delivered on the occasion of the Nobel award ceremony in 1982: William Faulkner had been his teacher. However, García Márquez was never a critic, not a literary theorist, activities also are not of your choice: he preferred and prefers to tell stories.

At the time of the Group of Barranquilla, Garcia Marquez read the great Russian writers, English and American, and honed his straightforward style of a journalist, but also together with its three inseparable friends, carefully analyzed the new American journalism. The life of those years was complete debauchery and madness. Were the times of the Cave, a bar that belonged to the dentist Vila Eduardo Fuenmayor and became a mythical place where they met members of the Group of Barranquilla to do crazy things, anything was possible there, until punching each other .

It was also the time when living in flophouse, as the skyscraper, four-story building, located on Street Crime, which also housed a brothel. Often did not have the weight of fifty for the night, then gave the manager his tomes, drafts of the litter and said, “Stay with these monstrosities, which are worth more than my life. In the morning I bring you Silver and me back. ”

Group members founded a newspaper in Barranquilla fleeting life, Chronicle, which they served to give vent to his intellectual concerns. The director was Alfonso Fuenmayor, the editor Gabriel García Márquez, illustrator Alejandro Obregón and his associates were, among others, Julio Mario Santo Domingo, Meira del Mar, Benjamin Sarta, John B. Gonzalo González Fernández.

Journalism and literature

In early 1950, when he was already well under way his first novel then the house accompanied Dona Luisa Santiaga the small,hot and dusty Aracataca, to sell the old house where he grew up. Then realized I was writing a novel false, because its people were not even a shadow of what was known in his childhood, to the ongoing work he changed the title to the litter , and the town was no longer Aracataca, but Macondo, in honor of the tall trees of the family of Bombace common in the region, like the kapok, which reach a height of between thirty and forty meters.

In February 1954, Garcia Marquez joined the staff of El Espectador, where he initially became the first film columnist for the Colombian journalism, then in a brilliant writer and reporter. The following year he appeared in Bogota the first issue of Mito, under the direction of Jorge Gaitan Duran.

It lasted only seven years, but it was enough, for the profound influence exerted on the Colombian cultural life, to believe that Mito indicates the time of the emergence of modernism in the intellectual history of the country, it played a definite role in society and Colombian culture: from the beginning stood in contemporary criticism and culture. Gabriel García Márquez published two papers in the journal, a chapter of the litter , the Monologue of Isabel Watching it rain in Macondo (1955), and the Colonel one writes (1958). In fact, the writer has always believed that myth was momentous, on occasion Pedro Gómez Valderrama said: “In Myth things started.”

In that year 1955, Garcia Marquez won the first prize in the Association of Writers and Artists, published Litter and an extensive report in installments, Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor which was banned by the regime of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, so that the directives of El Espectador Gabriel García Márquez decided to leave the country bound for Geneva to cover the conference of the Big Four, and then to Rome, where Pope Pius XII apparently dying. In Rome attended by a few weeks, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinema.

Hovering around the world

Four years was absent from Colombia. He lived a long time in Paris, and visited Poland and Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. He continued as a correspondent for El Espectador, even in difficult conditions, for although he wrote two novels, The Colonel no one writes and the wrong time , poor living to die, waiting for the monthly turnover should send the viewer but delayed due to daily difficulties with the system of Rojas Pinilla. This situation is reflected in the Colonel , which chronicles the despair of an old officer of the Thousand Days War awaiting the official letter that was to announce the retirement pension entitlements. He was also a correspondent for The Independent, when El Espectador was closed by the dictatorship and also worked with the Venezuelan magazine colombianisima Elite and stickers.

His stay in Europe allowed Garcia Marquez see Latin America in perspective. He noted the differences between Latin American countries, and also took a lot of material to write stories about Latinos living in the city of light.Learned to distrust of French intellectuals, its schematic abstractions and mental games, and realized that old Europe was a continent in decline while America and especially Latin America was the new, renewal, alive.

SAt the end of 1957 was connected to the Time magazine and traveled to Venezuela, where he witnessed the last moments of the dictatorship of General Marcos Pérez Jiménez. In March 1958, married in Barranquilla with Mercedes Barcha, which union were born two children: Rodrigo (1959), baptized in Palermo Clinic in Bogota by Camilo Torres Restrepo, Gonzalo (1962). Shortly after their marriage, back to Venezuela, had to leave to office and take a grueling work in Venezuela Gráfica, while occasionally collaborating elite.

Despite having little time to write his story one day after the Sabbath was awarded. In 1959 he was appointed director of the newly formed Cuban news agency Prensa Latina. In 1960 he lived six months in Cuba and the following year he moved to New York, but had big problems with the Cuban exiles and eventually resigned.After touring the southern United States went to live in Mexico. Needless to say, after that stay in the U.S., the country’s government denied an entry visa, because, according to authorities, Garcia Marquez was a member of the Communist Party. Only in 1971, when Columbia University was awarded the title of doctor honoris causa , was given a visa, but conditioned.

Just arrived in Mexico, where Garcia Marquez has experienced many years of his life, he turned to writing screenplays for two years (1961-1963) published in magazines and Family Events, of which he directed. In their attempts to film the most successful was The Golden Cockerel (1963), based on a story by the same name written by Juan Rulfo, and García Márquez also adapted to the writer Carlos Fuentes. The previous year had won the award for Best Novel Esso Colombiana with the wrong time.

Consecration

One day in 1966 when it was en route from Mexico City to the resort of Acapulco, Gabriel Garcia Marquez had a sudden vision of the novel that had been meditating for 17 years, and was considered mature, sat at the machine for 18 months followed by eight or more hours worked per day, while his wife looked after the home support.

In 1967 appeared Hundred Years of Solitude , a novel whose universe is cyclical time, in the fantastic stories happening: insomnia plagues, floods, excessive fertility, levitation … It’s a great metaphor in which, while it tells the story of the generations of the Buendia in the magical world of Macondo, from the founding of the town until the complete extinction of the race, there are supremely Colombian history since after the release until the thirties of this century. In that book Pablo Neruda, the great Chilean poet, said: “It’s the best novel ever written in Castilian after Don Quixote.” With so qualified concept has said it all: the book is not only the magnum opus of García Márquez, but constitutes a landmark in Latin America as one of the books that most translations have, at least thirty languages, and has increased sales achieved, becoming a true bestseller worldwide.

After the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude , Garcia Marquez was established in Barcelona and spent time in Bogota, Mexico, Cartagena and Havana. During the three decades, has written four novels have been published three volumes of short stories and two stories, and important collections of his journalistic output and narrative.

Several elements make this journey, turned professional as a literary writer, and only after almost 23 years resumed his contributions to The Spectator. In 1985 the typewriter changed by the computer. His wife, Mercedes Barcha has always placed a bouquet of yellow roses in his desk, Garcia Marquez flowers considered good luck. A watchful portrait of Alejandro Obregon, the painter who gave him and wanted to kill a crazy night with five shots of 38 gauge, chaired the study. Finally, two of his journalistic colleagues, Alvaro Cepeda Samudio and Germain Vargas Cantillo, died, provided some prediction written in Hundred Years of Solitude .

Nobel Prize in Literature

At dawn on October 21, 1982, Garcia Marquez in Mexico received news that long ago waiting for these dates: the Swedish Academy awarded the coveted Nobel Prize for Literature. By then he was exiled in Mexico since the March 26, 1981 had to leave Colombia because the Colombian army wanted to arrest him for alleged links with the M-19 and because five years had kept the journal Alternative , of a socialist.

The Nobel award was a cultural event in Colombia and Latin America. The writer Juan Rulfo said: “For the first time in many years there has been a fair prize for literature.” The Nobel award ceremony was held in Stockholm on 8, 9 and 10 December, it was learned later disputed the award to Graham Greene and Gunther Grass.

Two events confirmed the profound sense of Garcia Marquez Latin America: on return of the prize was dressed in a classic and impeccable white linen liquiliqui, as the suit he wore his grandfather and used by the colonels in the civil war, and remained label in the continental Caribbean.With the speech “The Solitude of Latin America” (which he read on Wednesday December 8, 1982 at the Swedish Academy in full and to four guests and that was simultaneously translated into eight languages), attempted to break the molds or cliches that traditionally Europe has referred to Latin America, and denounced the lack of attention of the superpowers of the continent. He hinted how the Europeans are wrong in their position in the Americas, and have stayed with just the burden of wonder and magic that has stood to this part of the world.Suggested changing that view by creating a new and great utopia, life, which is in turn Latin America’s response to its own path of death.

The speech is a real piece of literature of great style and profound content Americanist, a beautiful expression of national identity, faith in the destiny of the continent and its peoples. It also confirmed its commitment to Latin America, always convinced that underdevelopment total, integral, affects all elements of American life. Therefore, the writers of this part of the world must be committed to the total social reality.

On the occasion of the delivery of the Nobel, the Colombian government, headed by Belisario Betancur, a colorful folkloric presentation scheduled in Stockholm. In addition, forward an issue of stamps bearing the effigy of Garcia Marquez drawn by the painter Juan Antonio Roda, design and text Dickens Castro Guillermo Angulo, about which the Nobel Prize winner said: “The dream of my life is that this stamp only bring letters of love. ”

Since the news of getting the coveted prize, the harassment of journalists and the media was permanent and commitments multiplied. However, in March 1983, Gabo returned to Colombia. In Cartagena they expected Dona Luisa Santiaga García Márquez, in his home in Santa Clara Alley in the traditional district of Manga, a hearty stew with three meats (salt, pork and chicken) and plenty of guava.

After the Nobel, Garcia Marquez was confirmed as leading figure of the national culture, Latin American and global.His concepts on different subjects exercised strong influence. During the government of Cesar Gaviria Trujillo (1990-1994), along with other scholars such as Manuel Elkin Patarroyo, Rodolfo Llinas and historian Marco Palacios, was part of the commission to design a national strategy for science, research and culture . But perhaps one of its most courageous attitude has been the ongoing support of the Cuban revolution and Fidel Castro, the defense of the socialist system imposed on the island and rejection of the U.S. blockade, which has helped other countries to support in any way Cuba and who has avoided major U.S. interventions.

After years of silence, in 2002 Garcia Marquez presented the first part of his memoirs, Living to Tell , which reviews the first thirty years of his life. The publication of this book was a publishing event, with the simultaneous release of the first edition (one million copies) in all Spanish speaking countries. In 2004 the novel was released Memories of My Melancholy Whores .

Gabriel Garcia Marquez Chronology

1927:

On March 6, Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in Aracataca (Magdalena, Colombia).

1947:

Start a career in law in Bogota. He published his first story.

1948:

The Bogotazo causes the closure of the university, Garcia Marquez calls transfer to the University of Cartagena, but still not finish their studies. He began his journalism.

1950:

Enter in the newspaper El Heraldo de Barranquilla and is active in the literary circles of the so-called Group of Barranquilla.He traveled with his mother to Aracataca to sell the birthplace, and feels that his real interest is writing about that world of his childhood.

1954:

He entered the newspaper The Spectator.

1955:

He published his first novel, Leaf Storm , who had begun writing in 1950. Publication ofStory of a Shipwrecked Sailor serialized in The viewer is censored by the regime of Garcia Marquez Rojas Pinilla and went into exile.

1958:

Myth in the journal publishes the Colonel one writes , the book that ended in January 1957 in Paris. Barranquilla is home to Mercedes Barcha.

1962:

Published the novel In Evil Hour and collection of stories The Big Mama’s Funeral .

1966:

Start writing One Hundred Years of Solitude .

1967:

Published in Buenos Aires the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude .

1970:

The Published in book Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor .

1973:

Published collection of short stories The incredible and sad story of candida Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother .

1975:

Post Autumn of the Patriarch , a novel that he wrote for eight years and which he read for ten years on the history of Latin America and its dictators.

1981:

Published Chronicle of a Death Foretold , a novel inspired by a real event that occurred during his youth.

1982:
The Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize for Literature. Volumes appearTexts coast and among cops , newspaper collections.

1985:

Post Love in the Time of Cholera , with initial edition of 750,000 copies.

1986:

Public Miguel’s Adventure Littín Clandestine in Chile .

1989:

Published the historical novel The General in His Labyrinth , on the figure of Simon Bolivar.

1992:

Post Strange Pilgrims , a collection of short stories.

1994:

Public theater monologue Diatribe of love against a man sitting .

1996:

Post News of a Kidnapping .

2002:

Post Living to Tell , part of his memoirs.

2004:

Published the short novel Memoirs of My Melancholy Whores .

Gabriel Garcia Marquez Work:

The work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, which won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, stands out for its refreshing character and his special imaginative fantasy.Regarded as the leading exponent of so-called magical realism, it would have on Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) his masterpiece, the Colombian writer is the author of an extensive body of excellent quality that has become one of the leading figures of the narrative world. García Márquez is also a paradigmatic figure of literature hispanomericana Boom of the 60, a phenomenon in some ways more editorial than literary and deservedly catapulted to fame in a large group of writers of excellent quality, which until then were known only over beyond the national level.

His first works, despite its intrinsic quality, are often seen as a preparation Hundred Years of Solitude : they appear already in the mythical world and some of the characters in Macondo, and in some cases, the magical and supernatural element . In Leaf Storm (1955) find the story of three witnesses before the corpse of a suicide, through whose monologues are fragmentary reconstructed the story of a lone man facing society. The Colonel no one writes , in 1961, is a vigorous tale of loneliness and misery of a colonel and his wife, whose son was shot in a poky old town in Colombia. Completing this stage the stories of Big Mama’s Funeral 1962, and In Evil Hour (1962), work that involves a political symbol, the source of collective fear and violence.

One Hundred Years of Solitude

In 1967 appeared Hundred Years of Solitude , the novel most read and admired by Garcia Marquez, who has been described by Vargas Llosa as “Amadis of America.” The work develops a family saga, the Buendia, who founded a town called Macondo in a region of swamps and jungles are inaccessible to the rest of the world. It begins when Jose Arcadio Buendia and Ursula Iguaran cousin marry despite the taboo and give rise, in the city they founded, to a race condemned to one hundred years of passion, speed and loneliness, strain that recurs in incest and expires at the end with a stem with pig tails.

TIn Macondo, relations with the outside world are outdated (some European innovations are introduced by wandering gypsies), but access to it a banana company that adds to natural disasters, exploitation and oppression. It certainly read the novel and its mythical Macondo as an allegory of underdevelopment and isolation of Latin America, but is primarily a work of prodigious imagination and humor, which breaks with a limited concept of realism to retrieve the sources of myth and oral legend, its inspiration. The novel is full of magical elements and surprising as the ascent to heaven of Remedios the Beauty, the finding of a galleon and ten miles from the sea, the rain of dead birds on the town. José Arcadio, for example, try to photograph God and later tied to a tree dies raving in Latin.

All men of the Buendía family are resolutely alone, surrounded by other men of war, or women who balance their sanity (or insanity) the excesses of the everyday world. The fate of all the inhabitants of Macondo is isolation. And the day that the first of the Aurelian (there is a Aureliano by generation: the repetition of names, such as events along its twenty chapters are not numbered, contribute to the feeling that life is a phenomenon circular), given strict instructions that no one, including his wife, he can approach more than ten feet. “In One Hundred Years of Solitude are written tons of papers,” said Garcia Marquez, but no one has touched the point that interested me most in writing the book, which is the idea that loneliness is the opposite of solidarity and I think that’s the essence of the book. ”

New Masterpieces

In 1970 the book was published in Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor , a news story that had been serialized in The Spectator (1955). The grain fantastic returns in the seven stories (all shiny) collected in the volume The incredible and sad story of candida Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother (1972). The Autumn of the Patriarch , 1975, another of his most celebrated novels, addresses the issue of dictatorship and is about the disaster and irremediable loneliness of power embodied in an anonymous figure and mythical.

Subsequently published Chronicle of a Death Foretold(1981), based on an incident that occurred during the childhood of the writer (a death, and known at the beginning of the novel, to avenge a disgrace)and Love in the Time of Cholera , 1986, love story set in a Caribbean port town. Also include the collection in four volumes of hisjournalistic work (1982) and political chronicle Miguel Littin’s Adventure (1986).

After releasing 1988 in Buenos Aires theater monologueDiatribe of love against a seated man , he published The General in His Labyrinth (1989), a novel about Simon Bolivar’s final journey from Bogota to Santa Marta, which provoked lively debate among scholars Colombians and Venezuelans on the historical accuracy of its content. In 1992 appeared the collection of short stories Strange Pilgrims . Two years later I saw the light of the novel Of Love and Other Demons and by 1996 published News of a Kidnapping , a novel story. In the first part of his memoirs, entitled Live to Tell (2002), as novel recalls his first thirty years of life. 2004 for the time of last novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores , love story between an old journalist and a very young prostitute.