Born March 6, 1928, in Aracataca, Colombia to Gabriel Eligio García and Maria Márquez Iguaran, he is the oldest of 12 children. He was given to maternal grandparents to raise in a gesture of conciliation for they hadn’t approved of their daughter’s marriage.

1946—received a bachelor’s degree from the National Colegia in Ziparquira.

1947-50—studied law in Bogota and Cartegena while working as a journalist; he eventually abandoned his law studies because journalism gave him more time to write.

1954—joined The Spectator in Bogota.

1955—Leaf Storm, first novel, influenced by Faulkner, published; trans. 1972

1955—a report he wrote revealing corruption in the Navy insulted the Rojas Pinella dictatorship, and his newspaper shut down

1955-7—worked in poverty in Paris and eastern Europe

1957—returned to Latin America, working over the next several years in Venezuela, Cuba, New York, and Mexico

1963—began writing film scripts

1967--published his masterwork, One Hundred Years of Solitude and continued to write fiction for the next several decades

1982—won the Nobel Prize for Literature

Increasingly politically active, he began to speak out for revolutionary governments in Latin America. He called himself an unaffiliated socialist who sympathizes with the nationalistic aspirations of the third world. He was a close friend of Panama’s Populist leader General Omar Torrijos (who died in a plane crash in 1981) and is a frequent visitor to Fidel Castro.

His US visa privileges have been clipped; he can enter the country whenever he wants but as an exception to the McCarren-Walter Act. He does come to the United States infrequently for a specific purpose, like giving a lecture or accepting an honorary degree.

Currently he lives and writes in Mexico City.

García Márquez attributes his love of fantasy to his grandmother who would tell him fantastic tales when she didn’t want to answer his questions. Her way of talking naturally about the supernatural would become the secret of writing convincing magical realism.

The recurring image in his fiction of the old military man battered by circumstances recalls his grandfather, a retired colonel who fought on the Liberal side in the Colombian Civil War.

In accepting his Nobel Prize he described Latin America as “a reality not of paper, but one that lives within us . . . and nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty.”

García Márquez's work displays a magical blend of history, politics, social realism, and fantasy, an attentiveness to pedestrian detail and an effortlessness in the use of complicated time shifts.

He is influenced by Franz Kafka’s use of metaphor and especially his insistence that the metaphor be taken seriously (as in “Metamorphosis”).

He is also influenced by William Faulkner in both the epic creation of an entire fictional world (in his case Macondo) and in the lyrical magic of his language; he points out that Faulkner is a Latin American writer as his world is that of the Gulf of Mexico.

García Márquez says that solitude is “the only subject I’ve written about”; he calls death “the only important thing that happens in a lifetime.”

In his writing the individual never has any real choice; an aura of Greek tragedy carries the characters towards their destinies.

• One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; tr. 1970)
  • an instant worldwide best seller and prize winner and made his reputation
  • novel is a prime example of magical realism, the juxtaposition of real and fantastic worlds
  • Pablo Neruda called the novel “the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since the Don Quixote of Cervantes.”
• Innocent Erendira and Other Stories (1972; trans. 1978), short story collection consisting of tales full of incredible substance and highly realistic details
• The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975; tr. 1976), depicting the evils of despotism as embodied by an unloved dictator
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981; tr. 1982). a novella
• Love in the Time of Cholera (1988)
• The General in his Labyrinth (1990)

InfoMarks (About InfoMarks)

• "Gabriel García Márquez" in Contemporary Literary Criticism--Select
• "Gabriel (Jose) García Márquez" in Contemporary Authors
• "Gabriel García Márquez" in Latin American Writers
• "Gabriel García Márquez" in Dictionary of Literary Biography

Links

• Macondo, the author's home page

Additional Sources

• Teisch, Jessica. "Gabriel García Márquez" Bookmarks Magazine. Jan/Feb 2003: 22-27.