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Gabriel García Márquez: Writer of Magical Realism

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Gabriel García Márquez (1927 to 2014) was a Colombian writer, associated with the Magical Realism genre of narrative fiction and credited with reinvigorating Latin American writing. He won the Nobel prize for literature in 1982, for a body of work that included novels such as "100 Years of Solitude" and "Love in the Time of Cholera."  

Fast Facts: Gabriel García Márquez

• Full Name: Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez
• Also Known As: Gabo
• Born: March 6, 1927, in Aracataca, Colombia
• Died: April 17, 2014, in Mexico City, Mexico
• Spouse : Mercedes Barcha Pardo, m. 1958
• Children : Rodrigo, b. 1959 and Gonzalo, b. 1962 
• Best-known Works: 100 Years of Solitude, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera
• Key Accomplishments:  Nobel Prize for Literature, 1982, leading writer of magical realism
• Quote : "Reality is also the myths of the common people. I realized that reality isn't just the police that kill people, but also everything that forms part of the life of the common people."

Magical realism is a type of narrative fiction which blends a realistic picture of ordinary life with fantastic elements. Ghosts walk among us, say its practitioners: García Márquez wrote of these elements with a wry sense of humor, and an honest and unmistakable prose style.  

Early Years 

Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez (known as "Gabo") was born on March 6, 1927, in the town of Aracataca, Colombia near the Caribbean coast. He was the eldest of 12 children; his father was a postal clerk, telegraph operator, and itinerant pharmacist, and when García Márquez was 8, his parents moved away so his father could find a job. García Márquez was left to be raised in a large ramshackle house by his maternal grandparents. His grandfather Nicolas Márquez Mejia was a liberal activist and a colonel during Columbia's Thousand Days War; his grandmother believed in magic and filled her grandson's head with superstitions and folk tales, dancing ghosts and spirits. 

In an interview published in The Atlantic in 1973, García Márquez said he had always been a writer. Certainly, all of the elements of his youth were interwoven into García Márquez's fiction, a blend of history and mystery and politics that Chilean poet Pablo Neruda compared to Cervantes's "Don Quixote."

Writing Career

García Márquez was educated at a Jesuit college and in 1946, began studying for the law at the National University of Bogota. When the editor of the liberal magazine "El Espectador" wrote an opinion piece stating that Colombia had no talented young writers, García Márquez sent him a selection of short stories, which the editor published as "Eyes of a Blue Dog." 

A brief burst of success was interrupted by the assassination of Colombia's president Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. In the following chaos, García Márquez left to become a journalist and investigative reporter in the Caribbean region, a role he would never give up.

Exile from Colombia

In 1954, García Márquez broke a news story about a sailor who survived the shipwreck of a Columbian Navy destroyer. Although the wreck had been attributed to a storm, the sailor reported that badly stowed illegal contraband from the US came loose and knocked eight of the crew overboard. The resulting scandal led to García Márquez's exile to Europe, where he continued writing short stories and news and magazine reports.

In 1955, his first novel, "Leafstorm" (La Hojarasca) was published: it had been written seven years earlier but he could not find a publisher until then. 

Marriage and Family

García Márquez married Mercedes Barcha Pardo in 1958, and they had two children: Rodrigo, born 1959, now a television and film director in the U.S., and Gonzalo, born in Mexico City in 1962, now a graphic designer. 

"One Hundred Years of Solitude" (1967) 

García Márquez got the idea for his most famous work while he was driving from Mexico City to Acapulco. To get it written, he holed up for 18 months, while his family went into debt $12,000, but at the end, he had 1,300 pages of manuscript. The first Spanish edition sold out in a week, and over the next 30 years, it sold more than 25 million copies and has been translated into more than 30 languages. 

The plot is set in Macondo, a town based on his own hometown of Aracataca, and its saga follows five generations of descendants of José Arcadio Buendía and his wife Ursula, and the city they founded. José Arcadio Buendía is based on García Márquez's own grandfather. Events in the story include a plague of insomnia, ghosts that grow old, a priest who levitates when he drinks hot chocolate, a woman who ascends into heaven while doing the laundry, and rain which lasts four years, 11 weeks and two days. 

In a 1970 review of the English language version, Robert Keily of The New York Times said it was a novel "so filled with humor, rich detail and startling distortion that it brings to mind the best of [William] Faulkner and Günter Grass." 

This book is so well known, even Oprah has put it on her must-read book list .

Political Activism 

García Márquez was an exile from Colombia for most of his adult life, mostly self-imposed, as a result of his anger and frustration over the violence that was taking over his country. He was a lifelong socialist, and a friend of Fidel Castro's: he wrote for La Prensa in Havana, and always maintained personal ties with the communist party in Colombia, even though he never joined as a member. A Venezuelan newspaper sent him behind the Iron Curtain to the Balkan States, and he discovered that far from an ideal Communist life, the Eastern European people lived in terror. 

He was repeatedly denied tourist visas to the United States because of his leftist leanings but was criticized by activists at home for not totally committing to communism. His first visit to the U.S. was the result of an invitation by President Bill Clinton to Martha's Vineyard.

Later Novels 

In 1975, the dictator Augustin Pinochet came to power in Chile, and García Márquez swore he would never write another novel until Pinochet was gone. Pinochet was to remain in power a grueling 17 years, and by 1981, García Márquez realized that he was allowing Pinochet to censor him. 

"Chronicle of a Death Foretold" was published in 1981, the retelling of a horrific murder of one of his childhood friends. The protagonist, a "merry and peaceful, and openhearted" son of a wealthy merchant, is hacked to death; the whole town knows in advance and can't (or won't) prevent it, even though the town doesn't really think he's guilty of the crime he's been accused of: a plague of inability to act.

In 1986, "Love in the Time of Cholera" was published, a romantic narrative of two star-crossed lovers who meet but don't connect again for over 50 years. Cholera in the title refers to both the disease and anger taken to the extreme of warfare. Thomas Pynchon, reviewing the book in the New York Times, extolled "the swing and translucency of writing, its slang and its classicism, the lyrical stretches and those end-of-sentence zingers." 

Death and Legacy 

In 1999, Gabriel García Márquez was diagnosed with lymphoma, but continued to write until 2004, when reviews of "Memories of My Melancholy Whores" were mixed—it was banned in Iran. After that, he slowly sank into dementia, dying in Mexico City on April 17, 2014. 

In addition to his unforgettable prose works, García Márquez brought world attention to the Latin American literary scene , set up an International Film School near Havana, and a school of journalism on the Caribbean coast. 

Notable Publications 

• 1947: "Eyes of a Blue Dog" 
• 1955: "Leafstorm," a family are mourners at the burial of a doctor whose secret past makes the entire town want to humiliate the corpse
• 1958: "No One Writes to the Colonel," a retired army officer begins an apparently futile attempt to get his military pension
• 1962: "In Evil Hour," set during the La Violencia, a violent period in Colombia during the late 1940s and early 1950s
• 1967: "One Hundred Years of Solitude" 
• 1970: "The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor," a compilation of shipwreck scandal articles
• 1975: "Autumn of the Patriarch," a dictator rules for two centuries, an indictment of all the dictators plaguing Latin America  
• 1981: "Chronicle of a Death Foretold"  
• 1986: "Love in the Time of Cholera" 
• 1989: "The General in the Labyrinth," account of the last years of the revolutionary hero Simon Bolivar
• 1994: "Love and Other Demons," an entire coastal town slips into communal madness
• 1996: "News of a Kidnapping," nonfiction report on the Colombian Medellin drug cartel
• 2004: "Memories of My Melancholy Whores," story of a 90-year-old journalist's affair with a 14-year-old prostitute
• Del Barco, Mandalit. "Writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Who Gave Voice to Latin America, Dies." National Public Radio April 17, 2014. Print.
• Fetters, Ashley. " The Origins of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Magic Realism. " The Atlantic April 17 2014. Print.
• Kandell, Jonathan. " Gabriel García Márquez, Conjurer of Literary Magic, Dies at 87 ." The New York Times April 17, 2014. Print.
• Kennedy, William. " The Yellow Trolley Car in Barcelona, and Other Visions ." The Atlantic January 1973. Print.
• Kiely, Robert. "Memory and Prophecy, Illusion and Reality Are Mixed and Made to Look the Same." The New York March 8, 1970. Print. Times
• Pynchon, Thomas. "The Heart's Eternal Vow." The New York Times 1988: April 10. Print.
• Vargas Llosa, Mario. García Márquez: Historia De Un Deicidio . Barcelona-Caracas: Monte Avila Editores, 1971. Print.
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Encyclopedia of Humanities

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Gabriel García Márquez

We explore Gabriel García Márquez, his career and literary influences. In addition, we discuss his characteristics, works and awards.

Who was Gabriel García Márquez?

Gabriel García Márquez, known by his nickname "Gabo"—a pseudonym given by Eduardo Zalamea Borda, editor of the newspaper El Espectador —was a Colombian journalist, writer, screenwriter, and editor regarded as the foremost exponent of literary magic realism, and one of Colombia’s most celebrated writers.

The works of García Márquez are among the most renowned in Latin American literature, particularly his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), winner of numerous international awards. His oeuvre is encompassed within the so-called "Latin American Boom" , as the wave of Latin American writers who emerged in the 1960s promoted by Spanish literary agent Carmen Balcells became known in Spain and worldwide.

García Márquez gained widespread popularity not only for his literary and journalistic genius but also for his openly leftist political stances . His well-known friendship with Cuban leader Fidel Castro sparked controversy both within and outside the literary world.

• See also: Jorge Luis Borges

Birth of Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez was born in Aracataca , a Colombian town in the Magdalena department, on March 6, 1927, to Gabriel Eligio García and Luisa Santiaga Márquez.

During his early childhood, his upbringing was in charge of his grandparents , until he later moved with his parents to Sucre, Barranquilla, in 1929.

Brief biography of Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez was a shy and reserved young man , not much inclined towards physical activities, with a penchant for writing humorous poems and drawing comic strips in the classes of the boarding school where he studied in Barranquilla.

He entered law school at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá. In those years, his first short story "La tercera resignación" appeared in the newspaper El espectador .

In March 1958, he married Mercedes Barcha , daughter of the apothecary of his hometown Barranquilla. They had two sons: Rodrigo and Gonzalo.

García Márquez did not complete his law degree , as the university was closed following the Bogotazo riots, leading him to decide to focus entirely on journalism. He never finished his higher education.

Journalistic Career of Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez began his career as a journalist at the newspaper El Universal , before working for El Heraldo . In 1961, he settled down in New York with his wife and first son to work as a correspondent for the Latin press.

However, pressures and threats from Cuban dissidents in the United States and the CIA forced him to move to Mexico City, where he spent most of his life. His ties with Fidel Castro and his political stances earned him the classification of "subversive" by the US government .

Literary Influences of Gabriel García Márquez

García Márquez was close to the Barranquilla Group, a literary association that was active from the 1940s to the late 1950s. There, he became acquainted with the works of the major Anglo-Saxon realist writers: Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf , James Joyce, and particularly William Faulkner , who had a profound influence on his work.

He was an admirer of Ancient Greek tragedy , such as those by Sophocles. He also often acknowledged the influence that the 1939 Colombian iconoclastic poetic movement "Piedra y cielo" (Stone and sky) had on him.

Literary characteristics of his work

Gabriel García Márquez's work is mainly encompassed within magic realis m, a literary fiction movement characterized by the integration of fantastic or mythical elements into realistic narratives, of which García Márquez is the leading figure alongside Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias.

Gabo sought out to reconcile the childhood stories told by his grandmother with his political and Latin Americanist concerns , taking up the concept of the "marvelous real" held by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier. His style garnered both widespread support and enormous artistic success, as well as accusations of exoticism. To all of this García Márquez consistently responded that there was not a single line in his novels that was not inspired by reality.

Major literary works of Gabriel García Márquez

García Márquez's body of work consists mainly of novels, short stories, journalistic articles, memoirs, television scripts, dramatic narratives, and journalistic fiction. Among his best-known works are:

• No One Writes to the Colonel ( El coronel no tiene quien le escriba ) (novel, 1961)
• One Hundred Years of Solitude ( Cien años de soledad ) (novel, 1967)
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold ( Crónica de una muerte anunciada ) (novel, 1981)
• Love in the Time of Cholera ( El amor en los tiempos del cólera ) (novel, 1985)
• The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor ( Relato de un náufrago ) (journalistic fiction, 1970)
• Big Mama's Funeral ( Los funerales de la Mama Grande ) (short stories, 1962)
• Eyes of a Blue Dog ( Ojos de perro azul ) (short stories, 1972)
• Strange Pilgrims ( Doce cuentos peregrinos ) (short stories, 1992)
• Living to Tell the Tale ( Vivir para contarla ) (memoirs, 2002)

Awards and recognitions of Gabriel García Márquez

García Márquez received numerous awards celebrating his thought and work, among which the following stand out:

• Nobel Prize in Literature (1982).
• Esso Literary Prize (1961).
• Rómulo Gallegos Prize (1972).
• Honorary Doctorate from Columbia University in the City of New York (1971).
• Mexican Order of the Aztec Eagle (1982).
• Legion of Honor Medal (Paris, France, 1981).
• In 2010, his birthplace in Aracataca, Colombia, was rebuilt and turned into a museum that bears his name.
• In 2008, a cultural center bearing his name was built in Mexico.
• In 2015, his portrait appeared on a new series of Colombian banknotes.

Political activism of García Márquez

Gabo adhered to a socialist view of the world , though he did not formally join any political party or identify himself as a communist. Like many intellectuals at the time, he sympathized with the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro, with whom he maintained a long-standing friendship.

He traveled to communist countries in Eastern Europe , including Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, and the USSR, and later wrote chronicles expressing his disagreement with the situation there.

His Nobel Prize acceptance speech, entitled "The Solitude of Latin America", addressed many of his political and philosophical considerations regarding his vision of the future of the continent.

García Márquez in fiction

García Márquez appears as a fictional character in Claudia Amengual's novel Cartagena (2015) , and in " El escritor de canciones ". Many of his works have been adapted into film and television.

Death of García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez died in Mexico City in April 2014 , having been diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. Upon his death, three days of national mourning were proclaimed in Colombia.

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Gabriel García Márquez

The making of a global writer, february 1, 2020 – january 2, 2022.

In 1965, Gabriel García Márquez was a Colombian writer living in Mexico City. He was mostly unknown beyond literary circles in Mexico and Colombia. For almost two decades, he struggled to become a full-time fiction writer. In 1967, the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude [Cien años de soledad] and its ensuing international success transformed its author into one of the most celebrated writers of the twentieth century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.

Drawing primarily on the papers of García Márquez acquired by the Ransom Center in 2014, this exhibition is comprised of approximately 300 objects, including numerous documents never seen in public before. These objects show how he became a literary icon. Throughout his life, García Márquez repeatedly thanked his family and friends for their support. Throughout the exhibition, correspondence, photos, and videos illustrate how his professional circle supported his literary career.

This exhibition is curated by Álvaro Santana-Acuña, assistant professor at Whitman College, and author of the book Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic .

Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez, affectionately known as Gabo, was born in 1927 in Aracataca, Colombia. He lived in this town near the Caribbean coast until the age of eight, in the home of his maternal grandparents.

A photograph of Gabriel García Márquez around the year 1929, at the age of two.

García Márquez was born in the department of Magdalena, located in Colombia's coastal region near Venezuela. This map was published during García Márquez's childhood and shows the main natural products of Colombia, including the banana plantations in the writer's home region.

Those early years shaped his literary imagination for the rest of his life. His grandfather told him true stories about the town and the region, like the massacre of banana plantation workers. His grandmother told him stories about ghosts and other fantastic events.

Photographs of Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, 1916, and Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía, 1917, García Márquez's grandparents.

For years, the shy boy lived in a world where the real and the fantastic occupied different rooms of the house of his grandparents. He wrote his first poems, under the pen name of Javier Garcés, and became interested in popular Caribbean music. The memories of the family home in Aracataca started to haunt the young García Márquez. By 1950, at age 23, he tried to write for the first time the story of the Buendía family that 17 years later was published as One Hundred Years of Solitude [Cien años de soledad] .

García Márquez's childhood house in Aracataca, Colombia. Floorplan hand-drawn by the writer in 1978.

Manuscript of One Hundred Years of Solitude [Cien años de soledad] , finished in 1966.

After high school, García Márquez moved to Colombia's capital, Bogotá, where he worked as a journalist and published his first short stories. In 1948, as Bogotá was devastated by the riots known as the Bogotazo, following the assassination of presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, García Márquez returned to the Caribbean coast.

In 1948, García Márquez moved back to the Caribbean coast, where he worked until 1953 for the newspapers El Universal of Cartagena and El Heraldo of Barranquilla. These were his first jobs as a journalist. In 1954, he returned to Bogotá to work for national newspaper El Espectador .

During his career, García Márquez embraced new writing technologies. At first, he used manual typewriters. When he was writing One Hundred Years of Solitude [Cien años de soledad] , he bought a Smith Corona, one of the first electric typewriters. He continued to buy new and modern typewriters, like the one in this photograph, which he used in the 1970s.

Gabo joined groups of artists in the cities of Cartagena and Barranquilla, and was influenced by modernist writers James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway. Faulkner's techniques inspired García Márquez's first short novel, Leaf Storm [La horajarasca] . And Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea influenced his first major success, his reportage about a shipwrecked sailor. In 1955, García Márquez left for Europe. In love with Neorealist cinema, he studied scriptwriting in Rome and then lived in Paris, where he wrote his second short novel, No One Writes to the Colonel [El coronel no tiene quien le escriba] .

Cinema was a lifelong influence on García Márquez's literary imagination. He wrote about films while working as a journalist in Cartagena, Barranquilla, and Bogotá in the 1940s. García Márquez is second from the left in this photo with friends from Colombia and Mexico.

After two years in Europe, he moved back to Latin America in 1958. He married Mercedes Barcha and worked as a freelance writer for magazines in Caracas, Venezuela. In 1961, Gabo moved to New York City to work for the news agency of the Cuban Revolution, Prensa Latina .

Gabo's first passport, which he used to travel to Europe in 1955.

Gabriel García Márquez and his wife Mercedes in 1967.

In 1961, García Márquez, his wife Mercedes, and his first son, Rodrigo, left New York for Mexico City. As an immigrant, he struggled to survive financially and had to work for popular magazines such as Sucesos para Todos and La Familia to support his family, which soon added his second son, Gonzalo.

Mercedes and García Márquez with their sons, Gonzalo and Rodrigo.

Gabo found work as a scriptwriter and dreamed of moving to Hollywood, but this project fell through. Instead he had to work in advertising in 1963, he believed that he could not become a professional writer. At the same time, Mexico City was rising as a center of the Latin American Boom in literature, where García Márquez witnessed the success of such novels as Mario Vargas Llosa's The Time of the Hero [La ciudad y los perros] and Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch [Rayuela] .

A 1963 copy of No One Writes to the Colonel [El coronel no tiene quien le escriba] by Gabriel García Márquez.

Image of Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar by R. Mellor.

Through his association with these novelists of the Boom and Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, the leader of a group of artists called La Mafia, García Márquez created lifelong professional connections, changed his literary style and writing habits, and saw his novels translated for the first time. Mexico City ended up being the place where Gabo spent most of the rest of his life.

García Márquez (third from right) in the company of prestigious film director Luis Buñuel (second from left) and other influential figures of the Mexican film industry in 1965.

For more than 15 years, García Márquez worked on a story about the Buendía family and the town of Macondo. In the fall of 1965, with support from his family, friends, and members of the literary group La Mafia, García Márquez quit his job and locked himself up in his studio to write the novel that would bring him world fame.

After so many years of setbacks and unsuccessful attempts to write One Hundred Years of Solitude [Cien años de soledad] , in 1965 García Márquez wrote to his friend, Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, about his new novel: "I'm very happy with it." He noted it would be 800 "sheets" and that he had already written "more than half." At this stage, he had decided the title of the novel, and had sketched the plot of the story, main characters, and key events.

While writing One Hundred Years of Solitude [Cien años de soledad] , Gabo exchanged letters with friends and writers in Latin America and Europe, giving them updates on how the novel was going. At home, he read passages and chapters of the novel in progress to his close friends and visitors and received their opinions. Concerned that the novel would not sell, he tested the novel with different publics by publishing excerpts of several chapters in magazines read in more than 20 countries.

Back cover of the book, Into the Mainstream: Conversations with Latin-American Writers (1967) written by Luis Harss and Barbara Dohmann. This pioneering and best-selling book came to define the key personalities of the Latin American Boom in literature. García Márquez was the least well known at the time and inclusion in the book attracted the attention of publishers.

As a result, international expectations about the forthcoming novel grew. When One Hundred Years of Solitude [Cien años de soledad] was published in May 1967, it became an immediate global success and soon changed the course of world literature.

Copy of the first edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude [Cien años de soledad] published in 1967 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, by Sudamericana Press.

In a 1981 interview published in The Paris Review , García Márquez remarked: “Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry.” The exhibition includes manuscripts of key literary works written by Gabo between 1975 and 2004, including The Autumn of the Patriarch [El otoño del patriarca] , Chronicle of a Death Foretold [Crónica de una muerte anunciada] , Love in the Time of Cholera [El amor en los tiempos del cólera] , The General in His Labyrinth [El general en su laberinto] , and Living to Tell the Tale [Vivir para contarla] , among others. Also on view are pages from his unpublished novel We'll See Each Other in August [En agosto nos vemos] and the second, unfinished volume of his autobiography.

Galley proof with revisions of The Autumn of the Patriarch [El otoño del patriarca] by García Márquez.

Barefoot and concentrating, Gabriel García Márquez works in his studio in Barcelona, Spain. At the time, he was writing The Autumn of the Patriarch [El otoño del patriarca] . Photograph taken by his son, Rodrigo García Barcha, in the 1970s.

These documents reveal some of the nails, screws, and materials of García Márquez's literary carpentry. One of his more powerful tools was his laborious editing of his own writing, producing much-improved drafts from one version to the next. For example, Gabo created 18 draft versions of his last published novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores .

Page from a draft of Memories of My Melancholy Whores [Memoria de mis putas tristes] . García Márquez was an obsessive editor of his works. Gabo produced seven full drafts of his last published novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores [Memoria de mis putas tristes] , before starting over completely. Then, he worked on another 11 drafts before arriving at a final version.

García Márquez photographed by author and artist Caleb Ives Bach reading, "La memoria de Gabriel…,” an excerpt of his autobiography published in a magazine.

Spanish literary agent Carmen Balcells helped García Márquez with his “carpentry.” She began to represent him in 1962.

Gabriel García Márquez in October 1982 with his friends Álvaro Mutis and Alejandro Obregón.

Spanish literary agent Carmen Balcells represented six Nobel laureates and was one of the most powerful literary agents in the world.

As his international fame grew, García Márquez used it for political and cultural ends. He befriended and met with world leaders such as Cuba's Fidel Castro, U.S. president Bill Clinton, Soviet ruler Mikhail Gorbachev, France's president François Mitterrand, and many others.

President Bill Clinton was a follower of García Márquez's works. Both admired the novels of American writer William Faulkner and this shared admiration was the beginning of a close relationship between the two from the mid-1990s onward. In this letter from 1996, Clinton thanks García Márquez for “promoting common cultural themes throughout the Americas.”

Cuban leader Fidel Castro and García Márquez met in the 1970s and became close friends. Gabo received both criticism and praise for his friendship with Castro and his support of the Cuban Revolution.

In the 1970s, García Márquez returned to journalism and wrote about the Cuban intervention in Angola, the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, the guerrillas in nations across Latin America, including Colombia, and other central political issues of the day.

A photocopy of The Washington Post featuring the article, "Colombian Author Writes on Cuba's Angola Intervention" (January 10, 1977).

As a cultural broker, García Márquez corresponded with leading artists of his time. Some, such as Francis Ford Coppola, Marlon Brando, and Akira Kurosawa, sought to adapt his works to films. In the 1980s, García Márquez founded the International Film and TV School in Cuba. The following decade he created in Colombia the Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano Foundation (now Gabo Foundation) with the goal of promoting ethical and modern journalism in Latin America.

When the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (left) won the Nobel Prize in 1971, García Márquez interviewed him. This photograph of Neruda and García Márquez was taken at Neruda's home in Normandy, France, in 1973.

Colombian singer Shakira (right), who was born in 1977 in Barranquilla, met García Márquez when she was 21. Gabo interviewed her in 1999 for Colombian magazine Hombre de Cambio .

In 1982, García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. During the ceremony, he delivered his famous acceptance speech, “The Solitude of Latin America.” The speech demonstrates his cultural and political commitment to the region's development without the interference of foreign powers.

García Márquez received the Nobel Prize from the King of Sweden at the award ceremony on December 10, 1982. He was the first Colombian to ever win a Nobel Prize.

By the time García Márquez received the Nobel Prize, he was already one of the most popular writers in the world. Each new book by him increased his reputation as a global literary icon, with first editions that sold millions and were published in over 20 languages.

Daria Hlazatova, a young reader from the Ukraine wrote and illustrated this letter for García Márquez in 2009, calling him “a true genius.” She also drew flowers for him.

As a global literary star, García Márquez received dozens of awards and honors and thousands of pieces of fan mail. Professors and students in the Department of Spanish at The University of Texas at Austin sent him a telegram to congratulate him for the Nobel Prize.

The face of García Márquez appears on currency, stamps, monuments, and street murals throughout the world. People, places, objects, and even planets are named after the towns and characters in his novels. He has influenced the works of generations of artists, from writers like Paul Auster to Hollywood movies like Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water .

Commemorative stamp issued by Colombia, 2014.

50,000 pesos bill issued by Colombia, 2016.

In 2014, people around the world mourned Gabo's death. Six years later, his legacy is alive and evolving, as global audiences anticipate the forthcoming Netflix adaptation of his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude [Cien años de soledad] .

Gabriel García Márquez participating at the IV Congreso Internacional de la Lengua Española in Cartagena which was held from March 26–29, 2007. This conference honored the writer for his career and celebrated the 40th anniversary of One Hundred Years of Solitude [Cien años de soledad] , with a new edition published by the Royal Spanish Academy.

The digital archive of Colombian-born writer Gabriel García Márquez includes manuscript drafts of published and unpublished works, research material, photographs, scrapbooks, correspondence, clippings, notebooks, screenplays, printed material, ephemera, and an audio recording of García Márquez's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.

The searchable, online archive is comprised of approximately 27,500 items from García Márquez's papers, and was made possible by a Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The Center also gratefully acknowledges the cooperation of Gabriel García Márquez's family.

All images from the papers of Gabriel García Márquez, Harry Ransom Center.

Exhibition Sponsor This exhibition is generously funded by Pilar and Jaime Dávila.

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Writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Who Gave Voice To Latin America, Dies

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Admirers ask Gabriel Garcia Marquez --€” seated alongside his wife, Mercedes Barcha €-- to sign books in Santa Marta, Colombia, in 2007. Alejandra Vega/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

Admirers ask Gabriel Garcia Marquez --€” seated alongside his wife, Mercedes Barcha €-- to sign books in Santa Marta, Colombia, in 2007.

Latin American author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1982, died Thursday. He was 87. Garcia Marquez, the master of a style known as magic realism, was and remains Latin America's best-known writer.

His novels were filled with miraculous and enchanting events and characters; love and madness; wars, politics, dreams and death. And everything he had written, Garcia Marquez once said, he knew or heard before he was 8 years old.

A Writer Shaped By His Beginnings

Garcia Marquez was born in 1927 in the Colombian coast town of Aracataca, which experienced a boom after a U.S. fruit company arrived. In a 1984 interview with NPR, he said his writing was forever shaped by the grandparents who raised him as a young child:

"There was a real dichotomy in me because, on one hand ... there was the world of my grandfather; a world of stark reality, of civil wars he told me about, since he had been a colonel in the last civil war. And then, on the other hand, there was the world of my grandmother, which was full of fantasy, completely outside of reality."

One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Garcia Marquez's grandfather, grandmother, their stories and their town became the raw material for his most famous work.

" One Hundred Years of Solitude is a towering book of enormous influence worldwide. And it is also as close as one could get to a perfect book," says Ilan Stavans, who wrote a biography of the author's early years, including the time Garcia Marquez spent as a newspaper journalist.

"He was a nobody," Stavans says. "He was really an unknown journalist and author of short stories, just beginning to make his career. He was, at that point, coming close to 40, and the fame and celebrity and this standing that he has as a literary giant of the 20th century really all coalesced in that particular moment when the book was published."

It was a unique moment in time, and One Hundred Years of Solitude struck a chord, says Gerald Martin, another Garcia Marquez biographer.

"You had to be in the 1960s. You had to be in the world of the Beatles and Third World revolution, psychedelia, lots of things, to understand now what impact the first page of that book had," Martin says. "It seemed to be a kind of writing that everybody had been waiting for. They didn't know they were waiting for it till it came. It was just one of those zeitgeist things."

Here's a taste of the book's first lines:

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time, Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point."

Martin says, "The first two lines, the first time you read them, you just felt, 'I've read this before. Where does this come from?' which is what [Garcia Marquez] felt when he first ... thought up the first line of the book."

Writing ' The Reality Of Latin America'

Garcia Marquez was part of a Latin American literature boom in the 1960s and '70s, along with Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes and Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, with whom Garcia Marquez differed sharply in his political beliefs. The Colombian got his leftist leanings from his grandfather, and they shaped his writing.

"I write mostly about the reality I know, about the reality of Latin America," Garcia Marquez said. "Any interpretation of this reality in literature must be political. I cannot escape my own ideology when I interpret reality in my books; it's inseparable."

Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in literature "for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts". Hulton Archive/Getty Images hide caption

Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in literature "for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts".

His 10 novels include The Autumn of the Patriarch , about a Latin American dictator, but they also include a love story about two elderly people married to other people, Love in the Time of Cholera , which was made into a film in 2007.

'He Gives A Voice To Latin America'

Garcia Marquez titled his 1982 Nobel Prize acceptance speech " The Solitude of Latin America ."

In it, he spoke about Latin America's wars, military coups, dictatorships and ethnocide:

"We, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of ... a new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth."

Chilean novelist Ariel Dorfman says the speech was one of the author's most important messages to the world.

"Garcia Marquez is speaking about all the people who are marginal to history, who have not had a voice," Dorfman says. "He gives a voice to all those who died. He gives a voice to all those who are not born yet. He gives a voice to Latin America."

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Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel Prize-winning explorer of myth and reality, dies at 87

Gabriel García Márquez, the Nobel Prize-winning Colombian writer who immersed the world in the powerful currents of magic realism, creating a literary style that blended reality, myth, love and loss in a series of emotionally rich novels that made him one of the most revered and influential writers of the 20th century, died April 17 at his home in Mexico City. He was 87.

The Associated Press reported his death. In July 2012, his brother Jaime García Márquez announced that the author had dementia.

Mr. García Márquez, who was affectionately known throughout Latin America as “Gabo,” was a journalist, novelist, screenwriter, playwright, memoirist and student of political history and modernist literature. Through the strength of his writing, he became a cultural icon who commanded a vast public following and who sometimes drew fire for his unwavering support of Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

In his novels, novellas and short stories, Mr. García Márquez addressed the themes of love, loneliness, death and power. Critics generally rank “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1967), “The Autumn of the Patriarch” (1975) and “Love in the Time of Cholera” (1985) as his masterpieces.

“The world has lost one of its greatest visionary writers — and one of my favorites from the time I was young,” President Obama said in a statement, calling the author “a representative and voice for the people of the Americas.”

Mr. García Márquez established his reputation with “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” an epic novel about multiple generations of the Buendía family in the fantastical town of Macondo, a lush settlement based on the author’s birthplace on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. The novel explored social, economic and political ideas in a way that captured the experience of an entire continent, but it also included supernatural elements, such as a scene in which a young woman ascends to heaven while folding the family sheets.

By fusing two seemingly disparate literary traditions — the realist and the fabulist — Mr. García Márquez advanced a dynamic literary form, magic realism, that seemed to capture both the mysterious and the mundane qualities of life in a decaying South American city. For many writers and readers, it opened up a new way of understanding their countries and themselves.

In awarding Mr. García Márquez the literature prize in 1982, the Nobel committee said he had created “a cosmos in which the human heart and the combined forces of history, time and again, burst the bounds of chaos.”

"One Hundred Years of Solitude" has been translated into more than 35 languages and has sold, by some accounts, more than 50 million copies. The Chilean poet and Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda described the book as "the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since the Don Quixote of Cervantes."

Mr. García Márquez parlayed his literary triumphs into political influence, befriending international dignitaries such as President Bill Clinton and François Mitterrand, the late president of France. The celebration for Mr. García Márquez’s 80th birthday was attended by five Colombian presidents and the king and queen of Spain.

Yet few knew the penury the author endured before achieving fame. “Everyone’s my friend since ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude,’ ” Mr. García Márquez once told a brother, “but no one knows what it cost me to get there.”

From ‘the House’ to the world

Gabriel José García Márquez was born March 6, 1927, in Aracataca, a town near Colombia's Caribbean coast . He was the eldest child of a local beauty and a telegraph-operator-turned-itinerant-pharmacist — some called him a "quack doctor" — but Mr. García Márquez was raised mostly by his maternal grandparents, the pragmatic Col. Nicolás Márquez Mejía and the superstitious Tranquilina Iguarán Cote.

Mr. García Márquez later called the colonel, a veteran of two civil wars, “the most important figure in my life” and “my umbilical cord with history and reality.” They lived in a rambling complex of rooms and terraces, which Mr. García Márquez would often call simply “the House.”

The author had a charmed yet melancholy childhood. Aracataca once flourished under the banana business of the U.S.-based United Fruit Co. but slowly declined after December 1928, when more than 1,000 striking banana workers in nearby Ciénaga were massacred by the Colombian army. Macondo, the town in “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” was named after a United Fruit plantation.

Eventually, Mr. García Márquez was reunited with his parents and siblings in Sucre, a river settlement in Colombia that became the setting for some of his darkest books.

He escaped by winning a scholarship to a secondary school near Bogotá, the capital of Colombia. After graduating in 1946, he enrolled in law school at the National University of Colombia. Poor and rail-thin, he asserted himself through his literary prowess. Neglecting his classes, he devoted himself to reading and writing, publishing short fiction in the Bogotá newspaper El Espectador.

His literary endeavors were interrupted when the populist leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was assassinated in 1948. The killing led to days of rioting in Bogotá and marked the beginning of a period of political repression known as “La Violencia.” Within about 10 years, between 200,000 and 300,000 Colombians were killed.

When the riots caused the law school to close, Mr. García Márquez moved to Cartagena, where he launched a career in journalism. Later he would say that the assassination greatly influenced his understanding of politics.

During these years, the author was often so poor that he had no place to live. In Barranquilla, just up the coast from Cartagena, he found his first apartment: a cheap room in a brothel nicknamed “the Skyscraper.” He said this was the perfect environment for a writer — quiet during the day, the scene of a party every night.

It was not until 1954, when he joined the staff of the El Espectador, that he gained financial stability. The next year, he published his first novel, “Leaf Storm,” a tale about the burial of a reclusive doctor in Macondo. It went virtually unnoticed.

In 1955, he became El Espectador’s European correspondent, visiting the Eastern Bloc and studying at the Experimental Film Center of Cinematography in Rome between deadlines. He was on assignment in Paris when his newspaper was closed by the Colombian government.

Rather than return home, Mr. García Márquez remained in the French capital for two years, living hand to mouth while completing “No One Writes to the Colonel,” a glittering short novel about a war veteran who would rather starve than sell his fighting rooster. The story, published in 1961, was influenced by Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” and Italian director Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist films, such as “Umberto D.”

After returning to South America in 1957, Mr. García Márquez held a series of journalism jobs. He married his longtime fiancée, Mercedes Barcha, in 1958. He moved to Mexico in 1961, beginning one of the most disheartening and exhilarating periods of his life.

Mexican breakthrough

When he arrived in Mexico City, Mr. García Márquez had few friends and no prospects of work. He aimed for the movie industry, but when his family ran out of food, he took a job editing a women’s magazine and a crime magazine on the condition that his name would never appear in either. Later he landed jobs as a scriptwriter and as an advertising copywriter.

In his mid-30s, his ability to write fiction appeared to have dried up. His previous novel had been written in Paris, and he couldn’t seem to finish another. According to the Uruguayan critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal, who first met Mr. García Márquez around this time, he was “a tortured soul, an inhabitant of the most exquisite hell: that of literary sterility.”

Yet several important events occurred during his creative drought. First, Mr. García Márquez began reading the original magic realists: Mexican Juan Rulfo, Cuban Alejo Carpentier and Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias, who would later win the Nobel Prize in literature. Next, he discovered the sophisticated Latin American novels that were being published in the movement known as "El Boom," including those by the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes , who embraced Mr. García Márquez as part of the group despite his lack of recent work.

One day in 1965, as Mr. García Márquez drove from Mexico City to Acapulco for a holiday weekend, everything changed. According to legend, he was navigating a twisting highway when the first sentence of “Solitude” suddenly formed in his mind:

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

In that line’s mix of past and present, military and miraculous, lay the germ of the entire book.

For the next year, Mr. García Márquez did nothing but write while his wife pawned almost all their possessions to feed the family. “I didn’t know what my wife was doing, and I didn’t ask any questions,” he told an interviewer. “But when I finished writing, my wife said: ‘Did you really finish it? We owe $12,000.’ ”

Their financial gamble paid off. A few weeks after the novel’s publication in Buenos Aires, the couple visited the Argentine capital’s most prestigious theater. As they looked for their seats, the entire audience gave them a spontaneous standing ovation.

In Gerald Martin's biography of Mr. García Márquez, journalist Tomás Eloy Martínez recalled: "At that precise moment, I saw fame come down from the sky, wrapped in a dazzling flapping of sheets, like Remedios the Beautiful, and bathe García Márquez in one of those winds of light that are immune to the ravages of time."

Although magic realism had existed long before “Solitude” appeared, Mr. García Márquez’s version of it captivated readers because it was informed by both a gritty engagement with Latin American politics (thanks to his years in journalism) and an intimate knowledge of folkloric beliefs (thanks to his grandmother in Aracataca).

Its characters include both the Colonel Aureliano Buendía (father of 17 sons by 17 women, perpetrator of 32 uprisings and survivor of 14 assassination attempts) and the gypsy Melquíades, who can see the future and cast spells. Its plot includes a massacre of banana workers and a rainstorm that lasts four years, 11 months and two days. And its prose was a revelation: luminous, opulent, ecstatic.

The result, William Deresiewicz wrote in the Nation, is that Mr. García Márquez’s “impossible fusion of subject and tone gives utterance to the Latin American soul: by fronting the continent’s tragic history with the unquenchable fiesta of his style.”

Politics, patriarch and punch

In the years after that Argentine ovation, Mr. García Márquez transformed into an international celebrity. He moved from Mexico to Barcelona, where he socialized with all the major writers of El Boom. He became particularly close to the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who named Mr. García Márquez the godfather of his second son.

Yet rifts in the friendship emerged in 1968 when the Cuban dissident Heberto Padilla was awarded a major literary prize against Castro’s wishes. The event proved a watershed moment for Latin American intellectuals. Most, including Vargas Llosa, supported Padilla and free speech. Mr. García Márquez supported Castro. When Castro imprisoned Padilla in 1971, the writers’ alliance cooled further.

The final break came in 1976, at a movie premiere in Mexico City. When Mr. García Márquez approached with an effusive, open-armed greeting (“Brother!”), Vargas Llosa punched him in the face. After the incident, rumors spread that there had been some impropriety with Vargas Llosa’s wife. (According to Martin, Mr. García Márquez’s most thorough biographer, the truth has never been uncovered.)

By that point, Mr. García Márquez was used to scandal. After Chile’s democratically elected government was overthrown by a military coup in 1973, he declared a literary “strike” to involve himself more directly in leftist politics.

His first move was to return to political journalism by co-founding­ the Colombian magazine Alternativa. His debut contribution was titled “Chile, the Coup, and the Gringos.” (The magazine was bombed the next year.)

His second move was to court the friendship of Castro. He decided, for instance, to write an article about Cuba’s military involvement in Angola and to submit the article to Castro for editing and approval before publication. Although the author’s meetings with Castro occasionally led to the release of Cuban prisoners, the Cuban dissident Reinaldo Arenas called Mr. García Márquez an “unscrupulous propagandist for communism who, taking refuge in the guarantees and facilities which liberty provides, set out to undermine it.”

Appropriately, the only novel Mr. García Márquez published during this period — “The Autumn of the Patriarch” (1975) — was a stunning meditation on the psychology and stratagems of power. Completed before his strike, the book portrays an unnamed tyrant who has been in power so long that no one can remember any other ruler. He ends up surrounded by people who tell him what he wants to hear but make fun of him behind his back.

Told in flashbacks in only 100 sentences, the book ranks among Mr. García Márquez’s most complex works. The novel, he declared, was “almost a personal confession, a totally autobiographical book” — a statement that has perplexed literary critics.

The great change

In 1980, after years of government pressure, Alternativa closed. The event marked the end of Mr. García Márquez’s overt political activism and his turn toward diplomacy and backroom mediation. It also cleared the way for his most electrifying literary period.

In 1981, he published “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” a suspenseful and technically dazzling interpretation of the honor killing of his friend Cayetano Gentile in Sucre. Its opening print run (2 million copies) was the largest in history for a work of literary fiction.

Four years later, he brought out “Love in the Time of Cholera.” Partly based on his parents’ courtship, it tells the story of a man who loses the love of his youth but wins her back a half-century later, after her husband dies rescuing a parrot in a mango tree.

Then, in 1989, at the age of 62, Mr. García Márquez published “The General in His Labyrinth,” a meticulously researched novel about Simon Bolívar, the liberator of South America.

Still thriving at 71, he bought Cambio magazine in Colombia with a group of investors and conducted an interview with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. In 1999, he received a diagnosis of lymphoma and was seldom seen in public in the last decade of his life.

Survivors include his wife, two sons, seven brothers and sisters, and a half sister.

As Mr. García Márquez’s health and memory faded, so, inevitably, did his literary muscle. His last four books — “Of Love and Other Demons” (1994), “News of a Kidnapping” (1996), “Living to Tell the Tale” (2001) and “Memories of My Melancholy Whores” (2004) — are generally considered his weakest.

Meanwhile, the next generation of Latin American writers turned him into a symbol of the fiction and the politics they rejected. A 1996 anthology called “McOndo” suggested that his vision of a tragi-miraculous Caribbean countryside had no relevance in a world dominated by McDonald’s. The region’s next rising star, the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño, scorned his cozy relationship with power.

Yet even those rebellions proved Mr. García Márquez’s enduring influence. Three decades after the publication of “Solitude,” he was still the titan with whom every serious Latin American writer needed to reckon.

He forged Latin America’s most contagious and original style. He wrote its most influential and popular books about the motives of tyrants and the endurance of love. And he explained what connects his perennial themes: “You know, old friend, the appetite for power is the result of an incapacity for love.”

Valdes is a writer specializing in Latin American literature.

FAMOUS AUTHORS

Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez is a Columbian novelist, screenwriter and journalist, born on 6th March 1927 in a small town called Aracataca, Columbia. He was mainly raised by his grandfather ‘papalelo’ who was a retired army Colonel whom Marquez called his ‘umbilical cord with history and reality’. The Colonel was a big inspiration for Marquez throughout his life. He taught Marquez everything there was to know about politics and helped shape his ideological outlooks. Marquez’s grandmother was also equally involved in his upbringing. He enjoyed her stories about magic and his parent relationship adventures in a deadpan style which was the source of inspiration of Marquez’s most well-known novel ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ about thirty years later.

Marquez enrolled in the University of Cartagena to study law. Writing for many local newspapers such as ‘El Universal’ in Cartagena and ‘El Heraldo’ in Barranquilla, Marquez began a career in journalism while bringing him to the end of his law studies.

Marquez’s most popular novel ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ was published in 1967 instantly gaining international commendation. It got him the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Romulo Gallegos Prize in 1972. The American author William Kennedy praised this book by calling it ‘the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race’. After the immense popularity of his novel, Marquez was fortunate enough to gain important friendships with many influential men. This led to his participation in various negotiations between the Columbian government and the guerillas.

Marquez’s novel ‘Autumn of the Patriarch’ published in 1975 was based on a Venezuelan dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez. It is a story about the life of the General and the solitude of power. ‘Chronicles of a Death Foretold’ was published in 1981 consisting of a plot of Santiago Nasar’s murder, which moved backwards. In the first chapter, Marquez tells who murdered him and the rest of the book narrates incidences that led to this murder.

Marquez’s novel ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ was published in 1985 and it was a love story that was based on the love affair of his own parents. Recent works by Marquez consist of a memoir ‘Vivir Para Contarla’ which is a 3 volume autobiography. His novel ‘Memories of my Melancholy Whores’ published in 2008 faced many controversies and was also banned in Iran after a few thousand copies were sold. Marquez announced his retirement from writing in 2008 however there have been rumors that he is writing a novel that is yet to be published.

Marquez never really set a determined style for his writing. He said a writing style varies with every book as every story differs from the other with a separate mood for each one. However ‘reality’ is a common and most important theme in all his novels. Most of his early works such as ‘In Evil Hour’ and ‘Nobody Writes to the Colonel’ portray the reality of the Columbian life.

Marquez has played a very significant role in the Latin American Boom of literature. Currently he is suffering from lymphatic cancer and is undergoing treatment.

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Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel laureate, dies at 87

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MEXICO CITY (AP) — Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez crafted intoxicating fiction from the fatalism, fantasy, cruelty and heroics of the world that set his mind churning as a child growing up on Colombia’s Caribbean coast.

One of the most revered and influential writers of his generation, he brought Latin America’s charm and maddening contradictions to life in the minds of millions and became the best-known practitioner of “magical realism,” a blending of fantastic elements into portrayals of daily life that made the extraordinary seem almost routine.

In his works, clouds of yellow butterflies precede a forbidden lover’s arrival. A heroic liberator of nations dies alone, destitute and far from home. “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings,” as one of his short stories is called, is spotted in a muddy courtyard.

Garcia Marquez’s own epic story ended Thursday, at age 87, with his death at his home in southern Mexico City, according to two people close to the family who spoke on condition of anonymity out of respect for the family’s privacy.

Known to millions simply as “Gabo,” Garcia Marquez was widely seen as the Spanish language’s most popular writer since Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th century. His extraordinary literary celebrity spawned comparisons with Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.

“A thousand years of solitude and sadness because of the death of the greatest Colombian of all time!” Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said on Twitter. “Such giants never die.”

His flamboyant and melancholy works — among them “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” ’'Love in the Time of Cholera” and “Autumn of the Patriarch” — outsold everything published in Spanish except the Bible. The epic 1967 novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” sold more than 50 million copies in more than 25 languages.

The first sentence of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” has become one of the most famous opening lines of all time: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

With writers including Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe, Garcia Marquez was also an early practitioner of the literary nonfiction that would become known as New Journalism. He became an elder statesman of Latin American journalism, with magisterial works of narrative non-fiction that included the “Story of A Shipwrecked Sailor,” the tale of a seaman lost on a life raft for 10 days. He was also a scion of the region’s left.

Shorter pieces dealt with subjects including Venezuela’s larger-than-life president, Hugo Chavez, while the book “News of a Kidnapping” vividly portrayed how cocaine traffickers led by Pablo Escobar had shred the social and moral fabric of his native Colombia, kidnapping members of its elite. In 1994, Garcia Marquez founded the Iberoamerican Foundation for New Journalism, which offers training and competitions to raise the standard of narrative and investigative journalism across Latin America.

But for so many inside and outside the region, it was his novels that became synonymous with Latin America itself.

“The world has lost one of its greatest visionary writers — and one of my favorites from the time I was young,” President Barack Obama said.

When he accepted the Nobel prize in 1982, Garcia Marquez described the region as a “source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable.”

Gerald Martin, Garcia Marquez’s semi-official biographer, told The Associated Press that “One Hundred Years of Solitude” was “the first novel in which Latin Americans recognized themselves, that defined them, celebrated their passion, their intensity, their spirituality and superstition, their grand propensity for failure.”

The Spanish Royal Academy, the arbiter of the language, celebrated the novel’s 40th anniversary with a special edition. It had only done so for just one other book, Cervantes’ “Don Quijote.”

Like many Latin American writers, Garcia Marquez transcended the world of letters. He became a hero to the Latin American left as an early ally of Cuba’s revolutionary leader Fidel Castro and a critic of Washington’s interventions from Vietnam to Chile. His affable visage, set off by a white mustache and bushy grey eyebrows, was instantly recognizable. Unable to receive a U.S. visa for years due to his politics, he was nonetheless courted by presidents and kings. He counted Bill Clinton and Francois Mitterrand among his presidential friends.

“From the time I read ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ more than 40 years ago, I was always amazed by his unique gifts of imagination, clarity of thought, and emotional honesty,” Clinton said Thursday. “I was honored to be his friend and to know his great heart and brilliant mind for more than 20 years.”

Garcia Marquez was born in Aracataca, a small Colombian town near the Caribbean coast on March 6, 1927. He was the eldest of the 11 children of Luisa Santiaga Marquez and Gabriel Elijio Garcia, a telegraphist and a wandering homeopathic pharmacist who fathered at least four children outside of his marriage.

Just after their first son was born, his parents left him with his maternal grandparents and moved to Barranquilla, where Garcia Marquez’s father opened the first of a series of homeopathic pharmacies that would invariably fail, leaving them barely able to make ends meet.

Garcia Marquez was raised for 10 years by his grandmother and his grandfather, a retired colonel who fought in the devastating 1,000-Day War that hastened Colombia’s loss of the Panamanian isthmus.

His grandparents’ tales would provide grist for Garcia Marquez’s fiction and Aracataca became the model for Macondo, the village surrounded by banana plantations at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains where “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is set.

“I have often been told by the family that I started recounting things, stories and so on, almost since I was born,” Garcia Marquez once told an interviewer. “Ever since I could speak.”

Garcia Marquez’s parents continued to have children, and barely made ends meet. Their first-born son was sent to a state-run boarding school just outside Bogota where he became a star student and voracious reader, favoring Hemingway, Faulkner, Dostoevsky and Kafka.

Garcia Marquez published his first piece of fiction as a student in 1947, mailing a short story to the newspaper El Espectador after its literary editor wrote that “Colombia’s younger generation has nothing to offer in the way of good literature anymore.”

His father insisted he study law but he dropped out, bored, and dedicated himself to journalism. The pay was atrocious and Garcia Marquez recalled his mother visiting him in Bogota and commenting in horror at his bedraggled appearance that: “I thought you were a beggar.”

Garcia Marquez wrote in 1955 about a sailor, washed off the deck of a Colombian warship during a storm, who reappeared weeks later at the village church where his family was offering a Mass for his soul.

“The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor” uncovered that the destroyer was carrying cargo, the cargo was contraband, and the vessel was overloaded. The authorities didn’t like it,” Garcia Marquez recalled.

Several months later, while he was in Europe, dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla’s government closed El Espectador.

In exile, he toured the Soviet-controlled east, he moved to Rome in 1955 to study cinema, a lifelong love. Then he moved to Paris, where he lived among intellectuals and artists exiled from the many Latin American dictatorships of the day.

Garcia Marquez returned to Colombia in 1958 to marry Mercedes Barcha, a neighbor from childhood days. They had two sons, Rodrigo, a film director, and Gonzalo, a graphic designer.

Garcia Marquez’s writing was constantly informed by his leftist political views, themselves forged in large part by a 1928 military massacre near Aracataca of banana workers striking against the United Fruit Company, which later became Chiquita. He was also greatly influenced by the assassination two decades later of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, a galvanizing leftist presidential candidate.

The killing would set off the “Bogotazo,” a weeklong riot that destroyed the center of Colombia’s capital and which Castro, a visiting student activist, also lived through.

Garcia Marquez would sign on to the young Cuban revolution as a journalist, working in Bogota and Havana for its news agency Prensa Latina, then later as the agency’s correspondent in New York.

Garcia Marquez wrote the epic “One Hundred Years of Solitude” in 18 months, living first off loans from friends and then by having his wife pawn their things, starting with the car and furniture.

By the time he finished writing in September 1966, their belongings had dwindled to an electric heater, a blender and a hairdryer. His wife then pawned those remaining items so that he could mail the manuscript to a publisher in Argentina.

When Garcia Marquez came home from the post office, his wife looked around and said, “We have no furniture left, we have nothing. We owe $5,000.”

She need not have worried; all 8,000 copies of the first run sold out in a week.

President Clinton himself recalled in an AP interview in 2007 reading “One Hundred Years of Solitude” while in law school and not being able to put it down, not even during classes.

“I realized this man had imagined something that seemed like a fantasy but was profoundly true and profoundly wise,” he said.

Garcia Marquez remained loyal to Castro even as other intellectuals lost patience with the Cuban leader’s intolerance for dissent. The U.S. writer Susan Sontag accused Garcia Marquez in 2005 of complicity by association in Cuban human rights violations. But others defended him, saying Garcia Marquez had persuaded Castro to help secure freedom for political prisoners.

Garcia Marquez’s politics caused the United States to deny him entry visas for years. After a 1981 run-in with Colombia’s government in which he was accused of sympathizing with M-19 rebels and sending money to a Venezuelan guerrilla group, he moved to Mexico City, where he lived most of the time for the rest of this life.

Garcia Marquez famously feuded with Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, who punched Garcia Marquez in a 1976 fight outside a Mexico City movie theater. Neither man ever publicly discussed the reason for the fight.

“A great man has died, one whose works gave the literature of our language great reach and prestige,” Vargas Llosa said Thursday.

His voice shaking, face hidden behind sunglasses and a baseball cap, Vargas Llosa said Garcia Marquez’s “novels will survive him and keep gaining readers around the world.”

A bon vivant with an impish personality, Garcia Marquez was a gracious host who would animatedly recount long stories to guests, and occasionally unleash a quick temper when he felt slighted or misrepresented by the press.

Martin, the biographer, said the writer’s penchant for embellishment often extended to his recounting of stories from his own life.

From childhood on, wrote Martin, “Garcia Marquez would have trouble with other people’s questioning of his veracity.”

Garcia Marquez turned down offers of diplomatic posts and spurned attempts to draft him to run for Colombia’s presidency, though he did get involved in behind-the-scenes peace mediation efforts between Colombia’s government and leftist rebels.

In 1998, already in his 70s, Garcia Marquez fulfilled a lifelong dream, buying a majority interest in the Colombian newsmagazine Cambio with money from his Nobel award.

“I’m a journalist. I’ve always been a journalist,” he told the AP at the time. “My books couldn’t have been written if I weren’t a journalist because all the material was taken from reality.”

Before falling ill with lymphatic cancer in June 1999, the author contributed prodigiously to the magazine, including one article that denounced what he considered the unfair political persecution of Clinton for sexual adventures.

Garcia Marquez’s memory began to fail as he entered his 80s, friends said. His last book, “Memories of My Melancholy Whores,” was published in 2004.

He is survived by his wife, his two sons, Rodrigo, a film director, and Gonzalo, a graphic designer, seven brothers and sisters and one half-sister. His family said late Thursday that his remains will be cremated and a private ceremony held.

Associated Press writer Frank Bajak reported from Lima, Peru. Paul Haven and Michael Weissenstein in Mexico City contributed.

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Gabriel García Márquez, Conjurer of Literary Magic, Dies at 87

By Jonathan Kandell

• April 17, 2014

Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian novelist whose “One Hundred Years of Solitude” established him as a giant of 20th-century literature, died on Thursday at his home in Mexico City. He was 87.

Cristóbal Pera, his former editor at Random House, confirmed the death. Mr. García Márquez learned he had lymphatic cancer in 1999, and a brother said in 2012 that he had developed senile dementia.

Mr. García Márquez, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, wrote fiction rooted in a mythical Latin American landscape of his own creation, but his appeal was universal. His books were translated into dozens of languages. He was among a select roster of canonical writers — Dickens, Tolstoy and Hemingway among them — who were embraced both by critics and by a mass audience.

“Each new work of his is received by expectant critics and readers as an event of world importance,” the Swedish Academy of Letters said in awarding him the Nobel.

Mr. García Márquez was a master of the literary genre known as magical realism, in which the miraculous and the real converge. In his novels and stories, storms rage for years, flowers drift from the skies, tyrants survive for centuries, priests levitate and corpses fail to decompose. And, more plausibly, lovers rekindle their passion after a half-century apart.

Magical realism, he said, sprang from Latin America’s history of vicious dictators and romantic revolutionaries, of long years of hunger, illness and violence. In accepting his Nobel, Mr. García Márquez said: “Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination. For our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable.”

Like many Latin American intellectuals and artists, Mr. García Márquez felt impelled to speak out on the political issues of his day. He viewed the world from a left-wing perspective, bitterly opposing Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the right-wing Chilean dictator, and unswervingly supporting Fidel Castro in Cuba. Mr. Castro became such a close friend that Mr. García Márquez showed him drafts of his unpublished books.

No draft had more impact than the one for “ One Hundred Years of Solitude .” Mr. García Márquez’s editor began reading it at home one rainy day, and as he read page after page by this unknown Colombian author, his excitement grew. Soon he called the Argentine novelist Tomás Eloy Martínez and summoned him urgently to the home.

Mr. Eloy Martinez remembered entering the foyer with wet shoes and encountering pages strewn across the floor by the editor in his eagerness to read through the work. They were the first pages of a book that in 1967 would vault Mr. García Márquez onto the world stage. He later authorized an English translation, by Gregory Rabassa. In Spanish or English, readers were tantalized from its opening sentences:

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Col. Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of 20 adobe houses built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”

“One Hundred Years of Solitude” would sell tens of millions of copies. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda called it “the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since ‘Don Quixote.’ ” The novelist William Kennedy hailed it as “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.”

Mr. García Márquez was rattled by the praise. He grew to hate “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” he said in interviews, because he feared his subsequent work would not measure up to it in readers’ eyes. He need not have worried. Almost all his 15 other novels and short-story collections were lionized by critics and devoured by readers.

Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian novelist who became one of the giants in the history of literature, died on Thursday at his home in Mexico City. He was 87. His works were rooted in a mythical Latin American landscape of his own creation, yet his appeal was so universal that his books were translated into dozens of languages and sold by the millions.

Mr. García Márquez working in his Mexico City home in 1962. He erupted on the literary world stage with the 1967 appearance of “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Over the next few decades, more than 20 million copies of the book were sold. He was considered the supreme exponent, if not the creator, of the literary genre known as magic realism, in which the miraculous and the real converge.

Mr. García Márquez received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. When awarding him the prize, the Swedish Academy of Letters noted that “each new work of his is received by expectant critics and readers as an event of world importance.

Like many Latin American intellectuals and artists, Mr. García Márquez felt impelled to speak out on the burning issues of the day. He viewed the world from a strongly left-wing perspective. He was a bitter opponent of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean right-wing dictator, and an unswerving supporter of Fidel Castro, who became such a close friend that Mr. García Márquez sometimes showed him drafts of his unpublished books.

In 2007, Mr. García Márquez returned to his hometown, Aracataca, a small town near Colombia’s Caribbean coast where he was born on March 6, 1927. The mythical village of Macondo in “One Hundred Years of Solitude” draws heavily on the town.

He was welcomed by fans as he rode through Aracataca in a horse-drawn carriage.

Mr. García Márquez waved to fans during the International Book Fair in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2007. “When I finished one book, I wouldn’t write for a while,” he said in a 1966 interview. “Then I had to learn how to do it all over again. The arm goes cold; there’s a learning process you have to go through again before you rediscover the warmth that comes over you when you are writing.”

Lived With His Grandparents

Gabriel García Márquez was born in Aracataca, a small town near Colombia’s Caribbean coast, on March 6, 1927, the eldest child of Luisa Santiaga Márquez and Gabriel Elijio García. His father, a postal clerk, telegraph operator and itinerant pharmacist, could barely support his wife and 12 children; Gabriel, the eldest, spent his early childhood living in the large, ramshackle house of his maternal grandparents. The house influenced his writing; it seemed inhabited, he said, by the ghosts his grandmother conjured in the stories she told.

His maternal grandfather, Nicolás Márquez Mejía, a retired army colonel, was also an influence — “the most important figure of my life,” Mr. García Márquez said. The grandfather bore a marked resemblance to Colonel Buendía, the protagonist of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” and the book’s mythical village of Macondo draws heavily on Aracataca.

In his 2002 memoir, “ Living to Tell the Tale ,” Mr. García Márquez recalled a river trip back to Aracataca in 1950, his first trip there since childhood.

“The first thing that struck me,” he wrote, “was the silence. A material silence I could have identified blindfolded among all the silences in the world. The reverberation of the heat was so intense that you seemed to be looking at everything through undulating glass. As far as the eye could see there was no recollection of human life, nothing that was not covered by a faint sprinkling of burning dust.”

Much of his fiction unfolds in or near Macondo, just as William Faulkner, whom he admired, invented Yoknapatawpha County as the Mississippi setting for some of his own novels.

Mr. García Márquez moved to Bogotá as a teenager. He studied law there but never received a degree; he turned instead to journalism. The late 1940s and early ’50s in Colombia were a period of civil strife known as La Violencia. The ideological causes were nebulous, but the savagery was stark, as many as 300,000 deaths. La Violencia would become the background for several of his novels.

Mr. García Márquez eked out a living writing for newspapers in Cartagena and then Barranquilla, where he lived in the garret of a brothel and saw a future in literature. “It was a bohemian life: finish at the paper at 1 in the morning, then write a poem or a short story until about 3, then go out to have a beer,” he said in an interview in 1996. “When you went home at dawn, ladies who were going to Mass would cross to the other side of the street for fear that you were either drunk or intending to mug or rape them.”

He read intensely — the Americans Hemingway, Faulkner, Twain and Melville; the Europeans Dickens, Tolstoy, Proust, Kafka and Virginia Woolf.

“I cannot imagine how anyone could even think of writing a novel without having at least a vague of idea of the 10,000 years of literature that have gone before,” Mr. García Márquez said. But, he added, “I’ve never tried to imitate authors I’ve admired. On the contrary, I’ve done all I could not to imitate them.”

As a journalist he scored a scoop when he interviewed a sailor who had been portrayed by the Colombian government as the heroic survivor of a navy destroyer lost at sea. The sailor admitted to him that the ship had been carrying a heavy load of contraband household goods, which unloosed during a storm and caused the ship to list enough to sink. His report, in 1955, infuriated Gen. Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, the country’s dictator, and Mr. García Márquez fled to Europe. He spent two years there as a foreign correspondent.

Unimpressed by Europe

Mr. García Márquez was less impressed by Western Europe than many Latin American writers, who looked to the Old World as their cultural fountainhead. His dispatches often reflected his belief that Europeans were patronizing toward Latin America even though their own societies were in decline.

He echoed these convictions in his Nobel address. Europeans, he said, “insist on measuring us with the yardstick that they use for themselves, forgetting that the ravages of life are not the same for all, and that the quest for our own identity is just as arduous and bloody for us as it was for them.”

Mr. García Márquez lost his job when his newspaper was shut down by the Rojas Pinilla regime. Stranded in Paris, he scavenged and sold bottles to survive, but he managed to begin a short novel, “In Evil Hour.”

While working on that book he took time off in 1957 to complete another short novel, “No One Writes to the Colonel,” about an impoverished retired army officer, not unlike the author’s grandfather, who waits endlessly for a letter replying to his requests for a military pension. It was published to acclaim four years later. (“In Evil Hour” was also published in the early 1960s.)

Mr. García Márquez alternated between journalism and fiction in the late 1950s. (A multipart newspaper series on a sailor lost at sea for 10 days was later published in book form as “The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor.”) While working for newspapers and magazines in Venezuela, he wrote a short-story collection, “Big Mama’s Funeral,” which is set in Macondo and incorporates the kind of magical elements he would master in “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” From 1959 to 1961 he supported the Castro revolution and wrote for Prensa Latina, the official Cuban press agency.

In 1961 he moved to Mexico City, where he would live on and off for the rest of his life. It was there, in 1965, after a four-year dry spell in which he wrote no fiction, that Mr. García Márquez began “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” The inspiration for it, he said, came to him while he was driving to Acapulco.

Returning home, he began an almost undistracted 18 months of writing while his wife, Mercedes, looked after the household. “When I was finished writing,” he recalled, “my wife said: ‘Did you really finish it? We owe $12,000.’ ”

With the book’s publication in 1967, in Buenos Aires, the family never owed a penny again. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” was sold out within days.

In following the rise and fall of the Buendía family through several generations of war and peace, affluence and poverty, the novel seemed to many critics and readers the defining saga of Latin America’s social and political history.

Mr. García Márquez made no claim to have invented magical realism; he pointed out that elements of it had appeared before in Latin American literature. But no one before him had used the style with such artistry, exuberance and power. Magical realism would soon inspire writers on both sides of the Atlantic, most notably Isabel Allende in Chile and Salman Rushdie in Britain.

“Reality is also the myths of the common people,” Mr. García Márquez told an interviewer. “I realized that reality isn’t just the police that kill people, but also everything that forms part of the life of the common people.”

In 1973, when General Pinochet overthrew Chile’s democratically elected Marxist president, Salvador Allende, who committed suicide , Mr. García Márquez vowed never to write as long as General Pinochet remained in power.

The Pinochet dictatorship lasted 17 years, but Mr. García Márquez released himself from his vow well before it ended. “I never thought he’d last so long,” he said in a 1997 interview with The Washington Post. “Time convinced me I was wrong. What I was doing was allowing Pinochet to stop me from writing, which means I had submitted to voluntary censorship.”

In 1975 he published his next novel, “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” about a dictator in a phantasmagorical Latin American state who rules for so many decades that nobody can recall what life was like before him. As he had predicted, some critics faulted the work for not matching the artistry of “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” But others raved about it, and it became a global best seller. He called it his best novel.

In “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” published in 1981, Mr. García Márquez used journalistic techniques to tell a story, apparently drawn from a real incident, in which the brothers of a woman who has lost her virginity murder the man responsible, Santiago Nasar. The brothers announce their intention to avenge their family honor, but because of a variety of odd circumstances, Nasar remains unaware of his impending fate.

“Love in the Time of Cholera,” published in 1985, was Mr. García Márquez’s most romantic novel, the story of the resumption of a passionate relationship between a recently widowed septuagenarian and the lover she had broken with more than 50 years before.

“The General in His Labyrinth,” published in 1989, combined imagination with historical fact to conjure up the last days of Simón Bolívar, the father of South America’s independence from Spain. The portrait of the aging Bolívar as a flatulent philanderer, abandoned and ridiculed by his onetime followers, aroused controversy on a continent that viewed him as South America’s version of George Washington. But Mr. García Márquez said that his depiction had been drawn from a careful perusal of Bolívar’s personal letters.

As his fame grew, Mr. García Márquez — or Gabo, as he was called by friends — enjoyed a lifestyle he would have found inconceivable in his struggling youth. He kept homes in Mexico City, Barcelona, Paris and Cartagena, on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. Recognizable by his bushy mustache, he dressed fastidiously, preferring a white monotone encompassing linen suits, shirts, shoes and even watchbands.

Devoted to the Left

He contributed his prestige, time and money to left-wing causes. He helped finance a Venezuelan political party. He was a strong defender of the Sandinistas, the leftist revolutionaries who took power in Nicaragua.

For more than three decades the State Department denied Mr. García Márquez a visa to travel in the United States, supposedly because he had been a member of the Colombian Communist Party in the 1950s but almost certainly because of his continuing espousal of left-wing causes and his friendship with Mr. Castro. The ban was rescinded in 1995 after President Bill Clinton invited him to Martha’s Vineyard.

Mr. García Márquez’s ties to Mr. Castro troubled some intellectuals and human rights advocates. Susan Sontag wrote in the 1980s, “To me it’s scandalous that a writer of such enormous talent be a spokesperson for a government which has put more people in jail (proportionately to its population) than any other government in the world.”

He attributed the criticism to what he called Americans’ “almost pornographic obsession with Castro.” But he became sensitive enough about the issue to intercede on behalf of jailed Cuban dissidents.

After receiving his cancer diagnosis in 1999, Mr. García Márquez devoted most of his subsequent writing to his memoirs. One exception was the novella “Memories of My Melancholy Whores,” about the love affair between a 90-year-old man and a 14-year-old prostitute, published in 2004.

In July 2012, his brother, Jaime, was quoted as saying that Mr. García Márquez had senile dementia and had stopped writing. Mr. Pera, the author’s editor at Random House Mondadori, said at the time that Mr. García Márquez had been working on a novel, “We’ll See Each Other in August,” but that no publication date had been scheduled. The author seemed disinclined to have it published, Mr. Pera said: “He told me, ‘This far along I don’t need to publish more.’ ”

Dozens of television and film adaptations were made of Mr. García Márquez’s works, but none achieved the critical or commercial success of his writing, and he declined requests for the movie rights to “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” The novel’s readers, he once said, “always imagine the characters as they want, as their aunt or their grandfather, and the moment you bring that to the screen, the reader’s margin for creativity disappears.”

Besides his wife, Mercedes, his survivors include two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.

Mr. García Márquez attributed his rigorous, disciplined schedule in part to his sons. As a young father he took them to school in the morning and picked them up in the afternoon. During the interval — from 8 in the morning to 2 in the afternoon — he would write.

“When I finished one book, I wouldn’t write for a while,” he said in 1966. “Then I had to learn how to do it all over again. The arm goes cold; there’s a learning process you have to go through again before you rediscover the warmth that comes over you when you are writing.”

Randal C. Archibold contributed reporting from Mexico City.

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Ten years without gabriel garcía márquez: an oral history, oral history.

The art and life of Mark di Suvero

Gabriel García Márquez. Photograph by Daniel Mordzinski.

Gabriel García Márquez died ten years ago this April, but people all over the world continue to be stunned, moved, seduced, and transformed by the beauty of his writing and the wildness of his imagination. He is the most translated Spanish-language author of this past century, and in many ways, rightly or wrongly, the made-up Macondo of One Hundred Years of Solitude has come to define the image of Latin America—especially for those of us from the Colombian Caribbean.

I have been writing about Gabo since 1995, when I met him for three days during a journalism workshop he led and decided that he himself would make an interesting subject. Colombia’s god of magical realism reminded me of my grandfather, I wrote in my first piece about him, which was later published in the Winter 1996 issue of  The Paris Review. In the early 2000s, I began interviewing his friends, family, fans, and naysayers for an oral biography that appeared in an early form in the magazine’s Summer 2003 issue . When he died in 2014, I was putting the final touches on the book that came of it: Solitude & Company, my collection of voices about the prankster who lifted himself from the provinces and won the Nobel Prize. A few days after his death, his agent and confidant, Carmen Balcells, told me, close to tears, that the world would now see the rise of a new religion: Gabismo. I was interested in this prediction, as a journalist.

And so I kept abreast of the story of Gabo’s life and legacy after he died. His archives were transferred to the University of Texas at Austin. In 2020, his wife, Mercedes Barcha, whom he called his sacred crocodile, died. In Colombia, the itinerant school of journalism that he started—the one where I attended his workshop—became the Gabo Foundation. And then there were unexpected developments: in 2019, Netflix announced a series based on  One Hundred Years of Solitude— an adaptation he’d sworn would never occur. (Macondo has been rebuilt by art directors somewhere in the interior of Colombia.) In 2022 a journalist reported that he’d had a daughter, who was born in Mexico City in 1990 and whose existence he’d kept secret from the public. And this week, a novel,  Until August, is being published posthumously in Spanish, English, and twenty other languages. It’s the story of a forty-six-year-old married woman who decides she’ll have a one-night stand every August 16, the day she makes a solo overnight trip to the unnamed Caribbean island where her mother is buried to put gladioli on her grave.

I decided, last year, to turn on my recorder again and ask about these past ten years since Gabo died. As I’ve continued to follow his story, Gabo, always a prankster, continues to surprise.

GABRIEL ELIGIO TORRES GARCÍA (García Márquez’s nephew): The last time we saw him, his cancer had already metastasized and his memory was affected, but he could still speak and carry on a conversation. He arrived and exclaimed, “When were all these people born?”

GUSTAVO TATIS GUERRA (poet and journalist): He looked like a lost grandfather—hugging his sisters, his nephews, his family, but still very lost.

GABRIEL ELIGIO TORRES GARCÍA: He was always coming up with these literary and poetic phrases, but at the same time he was just such a prankster.

MILAGROS MALDONADO (art promoter and friend of García Márquez’s): He said that what scared him most in life was losing his memory as he aged. I didn’t know that was a thing in his family.

GUSTAVO TATIS GUERRA: He resolved the whole oblivion thing with a hug and a smile, saying, “I know that I love you. I know I love you.”  

CAROLINA SANÍN (writer): Everyone has an anecdote about García Márquez. We all want a sense of familiarity with the most powerful man Colombia has ever produced—the magician, the only king we’ve ever had, maybe even a father figure. We have that need to see him as an ordinary man. But although he did in fact die, he wasn’t ordinary. We have to incorporate this concept of genius. Rodrigo and Gonzalo’s father is not the one who wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude . Homer and Kafka wrote it, as does everyone who ever reads it. The writer of the book and the book itself do not coincide.

MIGUEL IRIARTE (poet and the director of La Cueva, the cultural center named after Gabo’s buddies’ favorite dive bar in Barranquilla): Gabo’s Gabbings is the first entry in my list of gabadas, a glossary equal parts ridiculous and festive that I came up with to inject a bit of playfulness into a time of sadness. The list ended up growing longer … but here, I’ll recall a few— gabería , gabismo , gabitis , gabota , de Gabo a rabo . There are over fifty such gabadas now. And all of them stem from the same little root, Gabo’s Gabbings —1. A prankish Caribbean virtue about which the dignified know little and which is brimming with the life and work of García Márquez.

MILAGROS MALDONADO: I’d fallen in love with García Márquez from the moment I read Solitude in Chichiriviche, a small town in Venezuela. I jumped for joy in front of the sea just for having seen my reality reflected—not just in the individual sense but in our collective way of talking about the Caribbean.

JAIME ABELLO BANFI (the director of the Gabo Foundation): Anyone who said “Gabo is dead” and thought people would gradually stop reading him was dead wrong.

GUSTAVO TATIS GUERRA: I’ve seen him in two separate dreams. In one of them, it’s as if he never died—dressed in white, always talking effusively, the way it was when we were still able to talk with him, especially when we hosted all those gatherings, like when he offered to baptize the son of a friend of ours. We were like seven pairs of godparents.

GUSTAVO ARANGO (the author of two books about García Márquez): A truly personal loss. The writers you love are family. I think of the years of silence and oblivion. Those years of disconnection fascinate me. What they call in the movie industry a fade-out.

DASSO SALDÍVAR (García Márquez’s Colombian biographer): I was already feeling as though, yes, Gabo was gone, but then again here he was—he was even more present in the wake of his death because he was on his way to becoming a pure legend. Because we would soon enough be reading Gabo’s work as classics. Without the social scandals of the powerful, but in his purest form. And that part of it made me happy.

GUSTAVO ARANGO: He was very anxious about fame.

DASSO SALDÍVAR: Luisa, Gabo’s mother, didn’t appreciate all the fame. Her favorite daughter was Aida Rosa, the nun.

GABRIEL ELIGIO TORRES GARCÍA: He enjoyed going downtown, where he’d be recognized. He said he wished fame were like a light bulb—that it could be turned on and off.

GUSTAVO TATIS GUERRA: He always celebrated his birthday, March 6, with an accordion group, listening to vallenatos . To that last birthday in Cartagena, he invited a bunch of accordion groups, one of which included Leandro Díaz. All of a sudden, the two of them, Leandro and Gabo, get up and dance to “The Crowned Goddess.” A year before his death. Those two masters.

DASSO SALDÍVAR: Everyone has three lives. A public life, a private life, and a secret life. Gabo said that to Gerald Martin, his English-language biographer. As if to say, very delicately, Just behave yourself. Right?

GUSTAVO ARANGO: I find that story about his three lives curious. He started talking about it in the nineties.

GUSTAVO TATIS GUERRA: And in each of those three lives, women were always the protagonists.

MILAGROS MALDONADO: I never heard him talk about the three lives but I don’t doubt that he did, because when he wrote his memoir, Living to Tell the Tale , he told me, with a happiness that bounded on outright joy, “And you, you’re not in there.” So I must belong to the secret life.

GUSTAVO TATIS GUERRA: It was always a nod and a wink. When García Márquez mentioned the secret life on French television, back in 1997 I think, I was surprised by that revelation. That wink. That first hint of his secret life that might just have to be looked into.

GUSTAVO ARANGO: It was right around the time his daughter was born in 1990 that he began to talk about the secret life. He’d never spoken about the secret life before, though he already had one.

GUSTAVO TATIS GUERRA: So on that day, April 17, 2014, I was in San Antero having lunch with a couple of others when suddenly the news came that García Márquez had died. The three of us sat there talking about the rumors that he’d had a secret daughter.

MILAGROS MALDONADO: Mercedes was very self-assured. Really, she was incredibly tough. So I don’t think she was going to get into a lover’s quarrel about it. I don’t know but I just don’t see her doing that sort of thing. You don’t go all in like that. It’s just that she was such an amazing person. Truly extraordinary, very confident.

DASSO SALDÍVAR: Mercedes was just always so sure of that love, and of Gabo’s love for her. Their love was a truly profound thing, something that went beyond reverence, beyond even time. The most beautiful thing about them wasn’t their fidelity, it was their loyalty. Fidelity is such an easy thing to break, but when it comes to love, the most important thing of all is loyalty, and the two of them had it.

NADIA CELIS (writer and scholar of Caribbean literature): I knew about it. It was a public secret among the extended and extensive García Márquez circle in Cartagena. There was no judgment, as having kids outside of marriage was a very common practice in that milieu, especially among powerful men. There was a kind of pact to not discuss it publicly, mostly out of respect to Mercedes.

GUSTAVO ARANGO: How does it affect García Márquez’s work one way or another, whether he has a daughter or not? For him, it must have been personally significant, having a daughter—I mean, considering that acutely feminine sensibility of his.

GUSTAVO TATIS GUERRA: This sort of thing has happened before on his father’s side of the family. The story of Gabo’s secret daughter also had a lot in common with the literary universe of García Márquez and his ancestors.

CATALINA RUIZ-NAVARRO (journalist and feminist activist): What surprises me is this pact that exists to never mention it and to continue to talk about Gabito as if he were good, kindly, pristine, beautiful, exemplary, even divine.

TERESITA GOYENECHE (journalist and writer): Here’s the debate about what it means to be an author—is someone an author because they’ve produced a work of literature, or are they an author because of the person they are, because they’re a public figure, because of how they operate and what they represent in the public eye. Their work becomes part of who they are in the public sphere. This man, who at some point in recent history showed us Cartagena writers that there were other faces across this country in which we could recognize ourselves, also had a private life outside the reach of the spotlight, a private life that some people find reprehensible. I don’t know if the story about his daughter is newsworthy simply because it involves someone whom the public feels is theirs, who belongs to them. As if they need to be in the know.

DASSO SALDÍVAR: I know many more things, but I’m not going to tell you. At least not for now.

Photograph of Gabriel García Márquez and Milagros Maldonado, sent to her by Mercedes Barcha. Courtesy of Milagros Maldonado.

STEPHEN ENNISS (director of the Harry Ransom Center): One day I simply received a phone call asking if the Center would be interested in purchasing the papers of García Márquez. That’s a pretty remarkable question to pose, and there’s only one answer.

ELIZABETH PAGE (former head of communications for the Ransom Center): We have manuscripts, photographs. Some correspondence. I love the family albums.

STEPHEN ENNISS: We also have three of his computers. Although for correspondence, it seems that he relied heavily on the telephone.

ELIZABETH PAGE: It’s all kept at freezing temperatures.

DIEGO GARCÍA ELIO (Mexican publisher who grew up with García Márquez’s two sons): Well, Gabo’s studio behind the house on Calle Fuego was hell. He kept the temperature over a hundred degrees.

ELIZABETH PAGE: We scanned over 27,000 documents. The interest in the collection has been extraordinary. People from all over the world consult it, especially from Latin America. That’s why it was also very important that it be accessible in Spanish.

STEPHEN ENNISS: We acquired the collection pretty quickly. Gabo had passed away, but Mercedes was there in the house still. One of our colleagues and I traveled to Mexico City to see the materials that had been offered to us. Gabo’s office was in a separate building behind the house and I remember walking into that lovely, lovely office of his with the walls lined with books and art and seeing his desk. And looking behind the desk and seeing the paper shredder. That was not what I was hoping to see there.

DIEGO GARCÍA ELIO: I gave a number of things to the Ransom Center, like the two manuscripts that my mother had of The General in His Labyrinth with different endings. He would always run nearly finished manuscripts past her so she could read them. They took the books that were first editions inscribed to him by his contemporaries. They took all the copies with dedications, but they left behind all the books he actually read, his normal reading material. Anyway, the studio in Calle Fuego is still full of his paintings, his photos, his desk, his computer … all of that is there, just as it was.

MILAGROS MALDONADO: He wrote from the moment he woke up until noon, come rain or shine, with a pair of Coke-bottle glasses so thick and foggy that I don’t know how he could even peer through them … then again, he didn’t need his own vision to be clear because he was really looking inwardly. That damn guy wasn’t waiting for inspiration to strike—he wasn’t thinking, I’m not going to write today just because I’m inspired. Forget all that. Plus, he had his own independent hideaway behind the house on Calle Fuego in Mexico. Nobody bothered him there. On the walls hung the Reverón and the Tamayo paintings that I had found for him.

DIEGO GARCÍA ELIO: And his personal assistant is still sitting in the same spot she was when he died. Mónica has been and still is the family secretary. You can see the place but you have to book a tour. The rest of the house isn’t open to viewings but eventually it will be. Anyway, it’s all there, they didn’t haul off everything.

STEPHEN ENNISS: What he really valued was finished work, and so he did not save multiple drafts of his writings. So most of the manuscripts that are in the archives tend to be very late-stage manuscripts with lighter revisions. But the exception is that final novel. Perhaps because he had not finished it before he died, he had retained multiple drafts of that novel while he was still working on it.

MILAGROS MALDONADO: He cut no corners when it came to his work. He didn’t have the typical lack of discipline found in most costeños , who will stay home from work after a late night of drinking and partying. He’d be there the next day going at it.

STEPHEN ENNISS: The novel was part of the archive from the beginning, even though it was unpublished. We were delighted that a previously unknown and unread work by Gabo would be in the archive. The permission that we received to digitize the collection did not extend to the unpublished novel, and so the novel is not online with the other digitized content. It was never online.

GUSTAVO ARANGO: The first thing I did when I arrived in Austin was dig up that novel.  When he died, in 2014, there was a lot of talk about it. I knew it was there—it was the first thing I asked the archivists about. When I read it, in a single sitting, the feeling I came away with was just that it lacked an editor’s touch. It was complete, it was well developed, it had a very clear ending

NADIA CELIS: I went to Austin in 2016 to explore his definition of romantic love and how it related to power. That’s when I read the novel. I knew that the manuscript was there, and that it was not to be published. I read bits and pieces here and there and it made sense to me that it was not meant to be published. It didn’t seem ready at all.

GUSTAVO ARANGO: I knew that the family had decided not to publish it. They’d made that announcement years before, persuaded by a reader at Carmen Balcells’s agency who, while Gabo was still working on the novel, said, No, it’s a long, repetitive story. That reader buried the novel while Gabo was still in the process of writing it. After that, Gabo didn’t really have it in him to work on it anymore. The reader’s report is right there with the novel itself. They blocked it just as it was about to break from the gates.

STEPHEN ENNISS: There was a sense from his sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo both, I believe, that since their father had not seen it through to completion, it would remain as an unpublished manuscript. That was the original thinking, and that’s why it wasn’t included in the digitization.

GUSTAVO ARANGO: The novel needed some adjustments. You can see where he changes words, reconstructs sentences in his own handwriting, but the novel itself was complete. We all hear the story about the editor Maxwell Perkins, who worked with Thomas Wolfe, among others, and practically rewrote his authors’ books, but here that wasn’t necessary.  It wasn’t about rewriting, just reorganizing and polishing.

ANNE McLEAN (the translator of Until August ): I was asked to read the manuscript of  En agosto nos vemos  at the end of March 2023 and I was so excited I could barely speak. I’d been extremely honored to be asked to translate a book of García Márquez’s journalism five or six years before, but I had no idea there was any unpublished fiction in existence.

FABIO RODRIGUEZ AMAYA (novelist and painter): Outrageous, to publish a novel I’m sure he never even finished. The same thing happened with Saramago.

ANNE McLEAN: His novels, which I first read thanks to the brilliance of Edith Grossman and Gregory Rabassa, lured me to travel to Colombia back in the late eighties, and then to learn Spanish. So, even though I already had my hands full last spring, with several contemporary Colombian and Spanish novels on the go, as well as Julio Cortázar’s letters, there was never really any chance I would turn down the opportunity to translate this novel.

GUSTAVO ARANGO: Reading the novel is just plain exciting. You feel the ease, the fluidity of the Gabriel García Márquez that you’ve come to know and love. It’s not that small-town setting anymore—it’s still the Caribbean, but with a more modern and urban setting. Every August 16, the protagonist returns to bring flowers to her mother’s grave.

JAVIER MUNGUÍA (co-editor of Las cartas del Boom ): Yes, this married woman living on an island goes every year to her mother’s grave and there, for the first time, she’s unfaithful to her husband. A couple of excerpts were actually published when Gabo was still alive … two chapters appeared in El País.  A translation of one appeared in the New Yorker in 1999.

ANNE McLEAN: I think I might have taken his state of mind into consideration when I first read the book in Spanish—I was on the lookout for uncharacteristic imperfections in the prose—but once I was translating, I was concentrating on recreating the novel’s narrative voice, which we know he began to invent at least a quarter of a century ago, long before he started to lose his focus.

GUSTAVO ARANGO: He started working on the book in the nineties and released two chapters of it, and then he published his last novella, Memories of My Melancholy Whores , in 2004. But meanwhile, he was working on Until August , back around 2000. He was enthusiastic, but also running out of steam.

FABIO RODRIGUEZ AMAYA: Memories of My Melancholy Whores brings a close to his life as a writer. People can say whatever they want, but his writing is beautiful. That book is the story of his nostalgia. It’s an homage to Barranquilla.

DASSO SALDÍVAR: Gustavo read the manuscript in Austin and took notes, and then he wrote a beautiful article that was published in Mexico’s El Universal titled “In Defense of Gabo’s Posthumous Novel.”

GUSTAVO ARANGO: I came out of the archives with the idea of starting a campaign to get the book published.

DASSO SALDÍVAR: When he was reading the novel, Gustavo called me in Madrid, saying, “Dasso, you know where I am? I’m reading Gabo’s novel.” “How is it?” I said. “Pure Gabo,” he tells me. “Pure Garcíamárquian to the core.” “Well, let me know,” I said. He said, “I just did.” Then we hung up.

NADIA CELIS: The text may satisfy some readers’ curiosity, impress them with its technical mastery, or resonate with their preconceived notions of the stereotypical Caribbean that are linked to his work. The book is just another example of the projection of male fantasies onto women’s sexuality that surfaces throughout García Márquez’s work, whose major premise about women’s desire is that all we truly want is men.

DASSO SALDÍVAR: I sent Gustavo’s article to Guillermo Angulo, who is a very good friend of Gabo’s sons. And he sent it to Rodrigo and Gonzalo. I also sent it to María Isabel Luque, Gabo’s agent at the Carmen Balcells agency. When she read it she said to me, “Dasso, what is this? How did Gustavo get permission to see it? How did he take all those notes?” And I told her, “Don’t worry, it’s on American soil, and he was allowed to read it. It’s such a great text. Read it and share it with Rodrigo and Gonzalo.” And that’s how they all got together and started talking about the novel.

JAVIER MUNGIA: There isn’t anything to corroborate their version. The fact is that each of them can say I helped get people talking about it, so the heirs would be more interested.

GUSTAVO ARANGO: At the archive, when they gave me the box with the folders, they told me I could not take pictures but that I was allowed to take notes. So, I transcribed long excerpts, about ten tight pages.

STEPHEN ENNISS: As I recall, once they made the decision that there was going to be a published novel, his family closed the access to the file.

GUSTAVO ARANGO: It’s not a lost novel. It’s a neglected novel.

JAIME ABELLO BANFI: The thing is, if Rodrigo and Gonzalo didn’t decide to publish it, someone else surely would. Pirated copies and all that.

NADIA CELIS: Have you seen that a pirated copy is already circulating in Colombia? A week to go before publication date. I received a pdf in a WhatsApp group, one that isn’t even made up of serious readers.

JAVIER MUNGUÍA: Well, it’s a given that it has been ten years since he died, that they want to publish it. It is Gabo’s last remaining novel—of course I’m going to read it when it comes out. As a passionate reader of Gabo’s, I’m extremely curious to see what the final work of fiction he attempted was like, right? When I first read him I was fifteen or sixteen years old in Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico, where I still live. They sold books in the supermarket and my dad brought me a copy of Solitude . I was already a big reader—Hesse, Kafka, Hemingway—but when I read that first paragraph, it was like being hit by a bullet. It was a whole other level, you know?

NADIA CELIS: Honestly, women readers don’t need someone akin to a grandfather dictating our path to freedom, sexual or otherwise.

MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN (poet and novelist): We already know that the “readers” some publishers have can be a bit brazen and will turn down a work on a whim. Balcells entrusted that task to a reader, whose name we still don’t know to this day, who flatly rejected the novel, and because of that determination, both the agency and the family decided to shelve the project. If it were just a matter of a work being unfinished, to this day we wouldn’t know about Musil’s monumental work The Man Without Qualities . Or Kafka. But enough with the comparisons, which—as Cervantes has already stated in his great novel—are indeed odious.

DASSO SALDÍVAR: It seems that the Balcells agency’s reader was a big fan of Vargas Llosa and that’s why they wrote that report. Pretty bad taste in literature, obviously. [Laughs.]

GUSTAVO ARANGO: One of my arguments for publishing the posthumous novel is precisely the fact that My Melancholy Whores isn’t good closure. He becomes an open target for Me Too. It’s too easy to disqualify writers now. Authors are being attacked for what their characters are doing.

NADIA CELIS: I do not believe that Gabriel García Márquez ought to be “canceled,” as some have advocated. I remain an advocate for the García Márquez of his major novels, whose cautionary tales about humanity’s capacity for self-destruction resonate deeply. His narratives reflect the dangerous lust for power that threatens our very existence on this planet. Sadly, although he could see the dangers of this lust in interactions between the poor and the rich, between everyday citizens and their corrupt rulers, or between small nations and imperial emissaries, he overlooked the force that rendered his male characters complicit in every form of tyrannical power—their passion for domination and their tendency to assert their manhood through violence, beginning with the violence inflicted upon the women they “love.”

VANESSA ROSALES (writer and podcaster): I do want to read the novel. Female subjectivity has come to the forefront in the of literature the past decade—the Ferrante phenomenon, Annie Ernaux winning a Nobel prize, and all these women in Latin America writing from the most different political, bodily, socially contextual places. So it’s interesting to see how García Márquez imagines female freedom and desire.

JAVIER MUNGUÍA: I just saw that the cover of Gabo’s novel has been released. It’s a woman under a tree—they just announced it at the Frankfurt Book Fair. We were just talking about him and there he appeared. Somehow Gabo is always here. He’s always so very present.

Carlos Fuentes, William Styron, and Gabriel García Márquez. Courtesy of the Styron family.

ROSANNA BULMER (councilmember of the Hay Festival of Literature and Arts): Our first Cartagena Hay Festival took place in January 2005, thanks to Carlos Fuentes. He said to our director that we should look into having it there given that Colombia was coming out of a very dark time. It was one of my great desires and ambitions to go to Colombia—the home of Gabriel García Márquez. When we arrived, there was a reception planned for us in the naval base where the president stays when visiting. When we arrived I noticed that the building was very austere. We were greeted by the wife of President Uribe. We were about seventy people all together, everyone very friendly and welcoming. All of a sudden the room fell silent. Gabriel García Márquez had arrived. And I understood that he was like God in Colombia.

CARMEN BALCELLS (Gabo’s agent, who died in 2015): Gabismo will become a religion.

STEPHEN ENNISS: The typed manuscript of One Hundred Years of Solitude is certainly sitting comfortably alongside our Gutenberg Bible.

GUSTAVO TATIS GUERRA: I’ve dreamed of Gabo as always dressed in white, effusive, happy, brimming with projects and always saying this, which he repeated to me every time we saw each other—that there are no formulas for any literary creation. That you just have to write, write, write. There’s never a reason to stop. That was the advice he gave me.

GABRIEL ELIGIO TORRES GARCÍA: When I told my uncle that I’d written a novel and Hurricane Katrina had swept it away, he said to me, “Don’t worry, that novel wasn’t going to turn out well anyway. Now you’ve just got to rewrite it and it’ll be better for it.”

DASSO SALDÍVAR: I dreamed that I’d arrived at the house where he wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude and that Gabo and Mercedes had already left but had forgotten everything. Even the boxes. And that Gabo had left all his manuscripts, all the early versions. Everything. The files, too.  And I said to myself, “This is wonderful, what a feast I’m about to have!” But since they were gone, the lights out, and it was starting to get dark. I prepared myself to read it all, but by then, night had fallen, and there was nothing more I could do but fall asleep on the floor, because this wasn’t a dream anymore, it was a nightmare.

LAURA MORA (director of the upcoming One Hundred Years of Solitude television series): My mom tells me that I’m so involved in the project that I’m living in nineteenth-century Macondo. I haven’t had any dreams or nightmares, but look, someone did give me a votive candle. [She holds the candle up to the screen, and instead of bearing the image of the Sacred Heart or the Virgin of Guadalupe, it shows the face of Gabriel García Márquez with a white ruff collar reminiscent of the days of Cervantes or Shakespeare.] We light it on set.

JAIME ABELLO BANFI: Let me tell you what happened to me a couple of years ago at his house in Cartagena. Gabo had already passed and Mercedes had lent the place to someone very close to the family so they could celebrate a wedding. When I pick up my glass of champagne, out of nowhere it bursts in my hand. The server brings me another glass and boom! It shatters again. That moment changed everything for me. I was scared at first, but then, in the very next instant, I felt an overwhelming sense of astonishment. The first thought that came to mind was, Of course Gabo is here. He’s pranking us! He’s just playing one more prank on us!

Silvana Paternostro is the author of Solitude & Company: The Life of Gabriel García Márquez Told with Help from His Friends, Family Fans, Arguers, Fellow Pranksters, Drunks, and a Few Respectable Souls .

Portions of this oral history were translated by Ezra Fitz, who has translated over twenty books, by authors ranging from Jorge Ramos and the Grammy-winning musician Juanes to the novelists Alberto Fuguet and Eloy Urroz. Shorter works have appeared in Words Without Borders, BOMB, A Public Space, Harper’s , and elsewhere. He lives in Spring Hill, Tennessee, with his wife and two young children.

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Gabriel García Márquez obituary

Few writers have produced novels that are acknowledged as masterpieces not only in their own countries but all around the world. Fewer still can be said to have written books that have changed the whole course of literature in their language. But the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez , who has died at the age of 87 after suffering from Alzheimer's disease achieved just that, especially thanks to his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Since its publication in 1967, more than 25m copies of the book have been sold in Spanish and other languages. For at least a generation the book firmly stamped Latin American literature as the domain of "magical realism".

Born in the small town of Aracataca, close to the Caribbean coast of Colombia , García Márquez (or "Gabo" as he was often affectionately nicknamed) always identified himself with the cultural mix of Spanish, black and indigenous traditions that continue to flourish there. Although later in life he lived in Paris, Mexico and elsewhere, his books returned constantly to this torrid coastal region, where the power of nature and myth still predominate over the restraints of cold reason.

This sense of identification with the Caribbean coast was strengthened by the fact that the young García Márquez was forced to leave it when he was eight, so marking out the period of his early childhood as the source of not only his most heartfelt memories, but as the wellspring for his literature. García Márquez has often recalled how, with his father absent as a telegraph operator, he was brought up by a grandfather who told him tales of his heroic deeds in Colombia's civil wars of the 19th century, and a grandmother whose every move was ruled by superstition. This combination of the ordinary and the extraordinary was the world that later resurfaced to such telling effect in One Hundred Years of Solitude and many other novels.

García Márquez's subsequent education took place in the capital, Bogotá, in the other, Andean part of Colombia. He always spoke of these years as of a cold, lonely exile. Forced to study law, he sought consolation in literature. At first, like many Colombians, he imagined himself a poet, until one day he discovered Franz Kafka and suddenly saw that everything was possible for the modern imaginative writer. Spurred on in this way, at the age of 20 he abandoned his law studies and from then on devoted himself to writing.

In the early 1950s he worked during the daytime as a newspaper reporter, first back on the coast and later in Bogotá on the newspaper El Espectador. His account of what had happened during the shipwreck of a Colombian naval vessel brought him renown as a journalist, but also got him into trouble with the authorities. This led to the start of a peripatetic and often wretchedly poor existence that lasted almost a decade. All the while, though, he was using the nights and any spare time to write fiction as well, and his first short novel, Leafstorm, was published in 1955.

Journalism was to remain a passion throughout his life: time and again his fictional stories have their basis in tales he heard as a young journalist, as he explains for example in the introduction to the 1994 novel Of Love and Other Demons. At the same time, whatever fantastic elements are to be found in his novels and short stories, García Márquez learned from journalism the craft of story-telling, showing himself to be an astounding judge of pace, surprise, and structure. He was also immensely interested in the cinema. In Rome in the 1950s he studied at the Experimental Film School, and while living in Mexico in the 1960s wrote several film scripts. He also dabbled in television soap operas, arguing that this was the way to reach the broadest possible audience and satisfy their need for narrative. In the early 1980s he helped found an International Film School near the Cuban capital of Havana. In 1994, he used some of the huge royalties his works had brought him to set up a school of journalism back on the Colombian Caribbean coast, at Cartagena de Indias.

But it is as a writer of fiction, enjoyed by everyone from untutored readers to academics in universities around the world, that García Márquez will be remembered. By the mid-1960s, he had published three novels that enjoyed reasonable critical acclaim in Latin America, but neither huge commercial nor international success. His fourth novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, first published not in Colombia but in Argentina, was to change all that. It tells the story of succeeding generations of the archetypal Buendía family and the amazing events that befall the isolated town of Macondo, in which fantasy and fact constantly intertwine to produce their own brand of magical logic. The novel has not only proved immediately accessible to readers everywhere, but has influenced writers of many nationalities, from Isabel Allende to Salman Rushdie. Although the novel was not the first example of magical realism produced in Latin America, it helped launch what became known as the boom in Latin American literature, which helped many young and talented writers find a new international audience for their often startlingly original work.

As with many other descriptions of literary schools, magical realism eventually came to seem almost as much a curse as a blessing. García Márquez professed himself amazed at the success One Hundred Years of Solitude enjoyed, and declared that he considered his masterly study of Latin American tyranny in Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) to be a more complete work of art. Almost as powerful were the classical simplicity of Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), the tender exploration of the impossibilities of love in Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), or the study of the collapse of utopian dreams in The General in His Labyrinth (1994).

Those dreams were prominent in García Márquez's speech when he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1982 . In it, he made a passionate appeal for European understanding of the tribulations of his own continent, concluding that "tellers of tales who, like me, are capable of believing anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to undertake the creation of a minor utopia: a new and limitless utopia wherein no one can decide for others how they are to die, where love can really be true and happiness possible, where the lineal generations of one hundred years of solitude will have at last and forever a second chance on earth".

García Márquez was also adamant that the writer had a public duty to speak out on political issues. His own views were strongly leftwing, opposed to what he saw as imperialism, particularly with regard to the domination of Latin America by the US. This distrust was reciprocated, and for many years, despite being one of the best-known writers among the reading public, he was denied access to the United States.

His socialist views led him to consistently back the Castro regime in Cuba, and he was a close personal friend of Fidel Castro. His faithfulness to the Cuban revolution led to him falling out with many of his own generation of Latin American writers, who became increasingly critical of the lack of intellectual freedom on the island. In response, García Márquez argued that he used his influence on the Cuban leader to secure the release of a large number of writers and other political prisoners from the island.

García Márquez was also passionately interested in the often tragic political situation of his own country. One of his early books In Evil Hour (1962) looks at the period of political violence in the 1950s, which caused over 100,000 deaths, and both in his fiction and his other writing he constantly looked for an end to the senseless killing.

After his period in exile during the 1950s, the violence of the 1970s also led him to spend most of his time outside the country. He helped founded a leftwing magazine, Alternativa, which promoted broadly socialist ideas, but never became directly involved in the political struggle. In the 1990s, as one of the few personalities his fellow Colombians actually trusted, he was several times mentioned as a possible presidential candidate, but always refused to lend himself to any campaign. Perhaps his most remarkable book about the political situation in Colombia was Noticia de un Secuestro (News of a Kidnapping, 1996) in which he describes in meticulous but passionate detail the kidnapping of 10 people by the drugs boss Pablo Escobar, and the complicated and only partly successful negotiations for their release. Few books reveal so chillingly the ability of the drugs mafia to penetrate to the very heart of society and pervert all its values.

His leftwing beliefs also led García Márquez to oppose military rule in the rest of Latin America. In 1975 he even claimed he would not write again until the Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet was removed from power (though he could not keep his word, and returned to publishing in 1981, with Chronicle of a Death Foretold). He also took a strongly anti-British line over the struggle for sovereignty in the Falkland islands in 1982.

Always outspoken in his public comments and in his journalism, García Márquez could also be immensely generous and warm in his private life. He was married to Mercedes, his childhood sweetheart, for over 40 years, and had two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo. He was famously loyal to his friends, but disdainful of all those whom he thought of as only being attracted to him because of his fame. Indeed, he often spoke of the difficulties and loneliness that international success had brought him, and sought whenever possible to keep his private world apart from it.

In 1999 the writer was diagnosed with lymphoma, or cancer of the immune system. The illness was to cloud his final years, requiring constant treatment. At times he was so ill that the international rumour mill not only proclaimed him to be at death's door several times, but apocryphal tales of his death-bed conversion to Catholicism circulated widely. Despite these rumours, he embarked on an ambitious autobiography.

Originally intended to be in three volumes, only the first, Vivir para Contarla (Living To Tell the Tale, 2002) came out, telling the story of his life up to his marriage with Mercedes. He also published Memorias de Mis Putas Tristes (Memories of My Melancholy Whores, 2004), but the very mixed reaction to his tale of a 90-year old and his liaison with a teenage prostitute convinced him that his writing days were over.

García Márquez's intense enjoyment of life shines through all his work, sometimes even seeming to be at variance with what is apparently its underlying message. As the title of his greatest novel tells us, its theme is the solitude and abandonment of Macondo, and yet the sheer appetite for life revealed in the characters and the storytelling itself speak instead of a huge wonder and enjoyment of existence. The millions of readers of García Márquez's books throughout the world appreciated above all that he wrote about immediately accessible themes such as love, friendship and death in a way that was new and yet plainly part of the great novel tradition. To many Latin Americans, García Márquez's work had the added importance of showing them that even if an author is born far from the centres of political and cultural power the sheer force of imagination can succeed in creating a world that will be magically recognised everywhere.

He is survived by a wife, Mercedes Barcha Pardo, and two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo. Nick Caistor

Katharine Viner writes: Before the world discovered his prodigious imagination, Gabriel García Márquez was a brilliant journalist with a strong commitment to his first profession. He founded his Fundacion para un Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano in Cartagena on the Colombian coast to promote South American journalists, and it was at the foundation's 1999 conference on weekend journalism that I met Gabo, as he insisted we call him; as editor of Guardian Weekend magazine, I was the guest lecturer from Britain.

He was fabulous company: both aware of his stature and funny, gossipy and generous. He told wonderful stories about his great friend Castro – how Fidel refused to have US satellite TV in his home, but would go round to Gabo's Cuban house to watch it – mostly for the sport.

Gabo had strong views on what American culture was doing to the world, and especially to love, telling me, "What is killing relationships is dialogue. If you don't communicate then neither of you is forced to lie." But what was most charming about being in Gabo's company was how he engaged with you with a generosity rare among many lesser figures.

The fact of my vegetarianism seemed to throw him monumentally: "It cannot be true!" he said. "You lack the forlorn look of vegetarians!" We had a small row about this. And then another about a few other things (a photograph of us arguing sits proudly on my mother's wall). "You are a dictator!" he said. "I'm horrified," I replied. "No, it is a compliment. Because I am a dictator as well."

He made the week in Cartagena one of the most thrilling of my life; but it didn't end there. A few days after I got home, a little jaded at my desk, he rang me. "You are a journalist. You are the editor of a fine magazine. It is the finest job in the world!" he said. "I am calling to tell you that we love you, and we miss you, and the places where you went dancing in Cartagena are calling out for you every day." He was a man who knew how to make you feel good; and every kindness sounded like poetry.

• Gabriel García Márquez

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• World Biography
• Gabriel García Márquez Biography

Gabriel García Márquez Biography

Author and journalist

Born Gabriel José García Márquez, March 6, 1928, in Aracataca, Colombia; son of Gabriel Eligio Garcia (a telegraph operator) and Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguaran; married Mercedes Barcha Pardo, 1958; children: two sons. Education: Attended Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 1947-48; attended Universidad de Cartagena, 1948-49.

Addresses: Home —P.O. Box 20736, Mexico City D.F., Mexico.

Began career as a journalist, 1947; reporter for Universal, Cartegena, Colombia, late 1940s, El heraldo , Baranquilla, Colombia, 1950-52, and El espectador , Bogota, Colombia, until 1955; freelance journalist in Paris, London, and Caracas, Venezuela, 1956-57; worked for Momento magazine, Caracas, 1957-59; helped form Prensa Latina news agency, Bogota, 1959, and worked as its correspondent in Havana, Cuba, and New York City, 1961; writer, 1965—; Fundacion Habeas, founder, 1979, president, 1979—; bought Cambio newsmagazine, 1999.

Awards: Colombian Association of Writers and Artists Award, 1954; Premio Literario Esso (Colombia), 1961; Chianciano Award (Italy), 1969; Prix de Meilleur Livre Etranger (France); 1969, Romulo Gallegos prize (Venezuela), 1971; honorary doctorate, Columbia University, 1971; Books Abroad/Neustadt International Prize for Literature, 1972; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1982; Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, 1988; Serfin Prize, 1989.

Gabriel García Márquez

One of the most influential novelists of the twentieth century, Gabriel García Márquez was a key figure in the Latin American literary renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s. His novel One Hundred Years of Solitude was read throughout the world, selling millions of copies and introducing enthusiastic readers across the globe to the genre of "magical realism." A prolific journalist as well as a novelist and short story writer, García Márquez has reported from several world capitals and remained active through the 1990s as publisher of the Colombian news magazine Cambio .

García Márquez was born on March 6, 1928, in Aracataca, Colombia, a small town on the Caribbean coast to which his mother's family had moved after her father, Colonel Nicolas Marquez Mejfa, had killed a man in a duel. The oldest child of eleven siblings, García Márquez grew up in Aracataca with his maternal grandparents, who nurtured the budding writer's imagination with fascinating stories of local history and family events. The Colonel reminisced frequently about his youth during the country's civil wars, while the boy's grandmother, who claimed to converse with ghosts and spirits, recounted family legends and became the boy's "source of the magical, superstitious and supernatural view of reality," as García Márquez described it in a New York Times Book Review article.

Among the more memorable family stories was that of García Márquez's parents' courtship. "This history of their forbidden love was one of the wonders of my youth," he wrote in "Seranade," a piece published in the New Yorker . So impassioned were his parents' accounts of the affair, he observed, that when he attempted to write about the subject in his novel Love in the Time of Cholera, "I couldn't distinguish between life and poetry." It was the Colonel who disapproved of Gabriel Eligio Garcia as a suitor for his daughter, Luisa Santiaga; the young telegraph operator had a reputation as a womanizer and had been born out of wedlock to a 14-year-old girl who went on to have six other children by three different men. "It is surprising that Colonel Marquez was so disquieted by this irregular conduct," García Márquez wrote, "when the Colonel himself had fathered, in addition to his three official children, nine more by different mothers, both before and after his marriage, and all of them were welcomed by his wife as if they were her own." Gabriel Eligio Garcia was also a political conservative—the party against whom the Colonel had fought in the civil wars—and had few financial prospects. After a passionate courtship that included violin serenades, exile, and even the purchase of a revolver by which Gabriel Eligio Garcia hoped to protect himself from the Colonel's wrath, the couple eloped. When Luisa Santiaga announced her first pregnancy, however, her parents welcomed her and her husband back to Aracataca, where the writer was born in his grandparents' house. García Márquez grew up with ten younger siblings and also has several half siblings from his father's extramarital affairs.

When García Márquez was seven, his grandfather died and the boy returned to his parents in Bogota, the country's capital. During his adolescence the boy developed a love of literature, with such works as Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" inspiring him to dream of becoming a writer. First, though, he planned to obtain a law degree. He entered the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in 1947, the same year he published his first short story in El Espectador . In 1948 the country erupted in violence after the assassination of reformist leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan and the university was damaged by fire and subsequently closed. García Márquez then transferred to the Universidad de Cartagena. There he began writing journalistic pieces for El Universal, and also met Ramon Vinyes, who introduced him to the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. García Márquez abandoned his legal studies in 1949 and moved back to the Caribbean region, to the town of Barranquilla.

During his two years in Barranquilla, García Márquez worked for El heraldo, the local paper, writing a regular column that included short stories, fragments, and essays about current issues. He then moved on to a job as correspondent for the Bogota paper El Espectador, writing film criticism and investigative reports. In the mid-1950s García Márquez moved to Europe, an environment he considered more amenable to his leftist political views than the regime in his native country. In Paris, where he was based, he continued reporting for El Espectador and also for another Colombian paper, El Independiente. He also continued to write fiction, publishing his first novel, Leaf Storm, in 1955 and completing the novel El coronel no tiene quien le escriba in 1957. Though he sometimes lived in poverty during these years, particularly after the Colombian government shut down El Independiente and left him without a regular income, García Márquez later noted that his European exile was worthwhile for the fresh perspective it gave him on Latin America.

In 1957 the young journalist moved back to Latin America to help a friend, Plinio Apuleye Mendoza, edit the weekly magazine Momento in Caracas, Venezuela. The following year, García Márquez returned to Barranquilla to marry his childhood sweetheart, Mercedes Barcha Pardo, the daughter of a local pharmacist. Soon afterward, García Márquez and Mendoza resigned from Momento to protest its tacit support of U.S. foreign policy. The pair traveled to Cuba to document the aftermath of Castro's revolution, and signed on with the new government's news agency, Prensa Latina, to establish branch offices in Bogota and eventually in New York City. In 1961 García Márquez quit Prensa Latina and moved to Mexico City, where he managed to support his family by writing screenplays and doing editorial and advertising work.

Though García Márquez continued a steady production of novellas and short stories during these years, he did not achieve prominence as a writer of fiction until the publication in 1967 of his landmark novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Based on the author's childhood memories of Aracataca, the novel recounts the founding of the fictional town of Macondo by Jose Arcadio Buendia, and its subsequent rise and fall through several generations from the 1820s to the 1920s. Blending historical events with surrealism and fantasy, the novel includes such characters as Colonel Aureliano Buendia, fomentor of 32 political rebellions and father of 17 illegitimate sons; matriarch Ursula Buendia, who witnesses the town's eventual decline; and the old gypsy scribe, Melquiades, whose mysterious manuscripts are revealed as the novel's text. The complex saga of Macondo and the Buendias, many critics noted, suggests the labyrinthine history of Latin America itself.

The novel caused an immediate sensation, selling out its entire first Spanish printing within one week. So heavy was demand for the book that its publisher could scarcely keep enough copies in print. Critics hailed it as a monumental achievement; Chilean Nobel laureate poet Pablo Neruda was quoted in Time as calling the book "the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since the Don Quixote of Cervantes." One Hundred Years of Solitude went on to sell more than 20 million copies worldwide and to be translated into more than 30 languages. It is widely considered the most popular and influential example of magical realism, a literary style that incorporates supernatural or surreal elements within a realistic narrative. As Faulkner had done with the American South, García Márquez had created in Macondo a world of mythic dimensions.

The success of One Hundred Years of Solitude enabled García Márquez to focus full-time on his own writing. In 1975 he published the novel The Autumn of the Patriarch, about a tyrant who has held political power for so long that no one can remember his predecessor. After that, however, he vowed not to release any additional fiction until Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was removed from office. Though Pinochet was not ousted until 1989, García Márquez published the novel Crónica de una meuerte anunciada in 1981. Considered by some critics to be the author's best work, it tells the story of brothers who plot to kill their sister's husband when, after discovering on his wedding night that his bride is not a virgin, he returns her to her family.

In 1982 García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. The Swedish Academy, in bestowing the prize, cited not only the author's narrative gifts but also his demonstrated commitment to social justice. Indeed, the problems of poverty and oppression were the theme of the laureate's acceptance speech. Citing figures that documented thousands of violent deaths and millions of involuntary exiles linked to the political turmoil in Latin America during the 1970s, García Márquez commented that the reality of his native continent nourished in him an "insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty," and made it necessary for Latin Americans to "ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable." Implying that Latin America's cultural remoteness has made it difficult for European and North American countries to sympathize with the leftist political agendas of many of its inhabitants, he went on to ask, "Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change?"

Criticizing wealthy countries that have "accumulated powers of destruction such as to annihilate, a hundred times over, not only all the human beings that have existed to this day, but also the totality of all living beings that have ever drawn breath on this planet of misfortune," García Márquez ended on a note of hope: "We, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of a new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth."

García Márquez decided to use his Nobel Prize money to start a newspaper. Yet that venture never materialized, because the author was not satisfied that the independent editorial voice he sought would be respected. More than a decade later, however, he realized his dream to go back to journalism when he bought the Colombian newsmagazine Cambio in 1999. "Journalism is the only trade that I like," he commented in the New York Times, "and I have always regarded myself as a journalist." The magazine had been struggling, but after García Márquez's purchase its circulation and ad revenues skyrocketed. The writer's international prominence, many observers noted, allowed him access to world leaders who were not always eager to speak to other reporters. "Anyone he calls will pick up the phone," said his American editor, Ash Green, in an Associated Press article. Among the friends and associates about whom García Márquez has written in Cambio are Cuban president Fidel Castro, Colombian industrialist Julio Mario Santo Domingo, and U.S. President Bill Clinton, who had once impressed the writer by reciting long passages of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury by heart. When Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky was revealed, García Márquez defended the president, according to New York Times reporter Larry Rohter, by asking "Is it fair that this rare example of the human species must squander his historic destiny just because he couldn't find a safe place to make love?"

García Márquez's reentry into journalism was not without significant risks. Unlike the more neutral American press, the Colombian media take "a strong position in defense of a democratic state rather than observing from an impartial perch," as Washington Post writer Scott Wilson pointed out. "Reporting in Colombia, particularly by Colombians," Wilson noted, "has long been a perilous vocation. But mounting violence, combined with the weakness of public institutions and the blurry line between journalism and advocacy in a country at war with itself, have increasingly placed journalists high on the list of targets." In the first ten months of 2001, nine journalists were killed in Colombia and dozens received death threats. Despite such dangers, García Márquez continued actively reporting on his country's decades-long war between Marxist guerillas and government forces, as well as on controversial issues in other parts of Latin America.

Among García Márquez's political books from this period are Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littin, a nonfiction account of filmmaker Littin's return to Pinochet's Chile after a period of self-imposed exile. The Chilean government, outraged by the book's content, ordered some 15,000 copies of it burned. In 1997 García Márquez published News of a Kidnapping, based on his investigation of Colombian drug cartels and their destructive influence on that nation's social fabric. " News of a Kidnapping not only provides a fascinating anatomy of 'one episode in the biblical holocaust that has been consuming Colombia for more than 20 years,'" wrote Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times , "but also offers the reader new insights into the surreal history of Mr. García Márquez's native country. Indeed, the reader is reminded by this book that the magical realism employed by Mr. García Márquez and other Latin American novelists is in part a narrative strategy for grappling with a social reality so hallucinatory, so irrational that it defies ordinary naturalistic description."

Through the 1980s and 1990s, García Márquez continued to strengthen his reputation as a literary master with publication of the novels Love in the Time of Cholera, based partially on the story of his parents' courtship; The General in His Labyrinth, a fictional account of the final months in the life of nineteenth-century South American revolutionary Simon Bolivar; and Of Love and Other Demons, inspired by the author's recollection of a tomb excavation he had witnessed in 1949, when a centuries-old skeleton of a young girl was discovered with living hair flowing from the skull. García Márquez used this image to create the character of Sierva Maria De Todos Los Angeles, a girl in touch with both the Spanish and the African legacies of her Caribbean heritage. When she is bitten by a mad dog, the area bishop orders an exorcism, but the priest charged with performing the rite falls in love with the girl. As with many of García Márquez's earlier novels, Of Love and Other Demons was hailed for its symbolic commentary on Latin American history. As Times Literary Supplement contributor Michael Kerrigan observed, "To excavate the historic vault in which his people lie buried is, for García Márquez, an act not of desecration but of liberation."

Since the summer of 1999, when he was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer, García Márquez has lived in relative seclusion, focusing his attention on completing a planned three-volume memoir. He was quoted in a CNN.com report as hailing his diagnosis as an "enormous stroke of luck" that forced him to put aside less urgent projects. The first volume of the memoir will cover the author's family background and his early life. The second will focus on his writing career, and the third will examine his relationships with world leaders.

In March of 2001, García Márquez swore never to set foot in Spain again unless the government withdrew new rules obliging Colombian visitors to obtain visas. According to the Guardian 's Giles Tremlett, García Márquez "said that Colombians grew up thinking of Spain as the 'madre patria,' or mother country, even though Colombia won independence from Spain in 1820." In 2002, the first volume of García Márquez's memoir, Vivir Para Contarla (To Live to Tell It) was published. It was later published in the United States under the title Living to Tell the Tale. On November 6, 2003, a tribute in honor of the American publication of his memoir was held at the Town Hall Theater in Manhattan. García Márquez did not attend the event, but he sent a statement. In December of that year, the book was named a New York Times Editor's Choice for 2003. In 2004, García Márquez received even more recognition when talk-show host Oprah Winfrey chose One Hundred Years of Solitude as her January book club selection.

García Márquez continued to stir up controversy in September of 2004 when he was barred from the International Congress of the Spanish Language because he objects to the formal teaching of spelling, a position that angers many of the conference's organizers. On October 18, 2004, his novel Memorias de Mis Putas Tristes (Memories of My Sad Whore), was published a week early in Colombia in order to deter people from buying pirated copies. He thwarted bootleggers by changing the last chapter at the last minute, revealing the fact as one million copies of the book shipped to stores throughout Latin America and Spain. With the November 9, 2004, sale of the film rights to his novel Love in the Time of Cholera, García Márquez is certain to keep his name in the news.

Selected writings

La hojarasca (novel; title means "Leaf Storm"), Ediciones Sipa, 1955.

El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (novella), Aguirre Editor, 1961; translated as No One Writes to the Colonel, Harper & Row, 1968.

La mala hora (novel), Talleres de Graficas (Madrid, Spain), 1961; reprinted, Bruguera (Barcelona, Spain), 1982; English translation by Gregory Rabassa published as In Evil Hour, Harper (New York, NY), 1979.

Los funerales de la Mamá Grande (short stories), Editorial Universidad Veracruzana, 1962.

(With Carlos Fuentes) El Gallo de Oro, screenplay from novel by Juan Rulfo, 1964.

Cien años de soledad (novel), Editorial Sudamericana, 1967; translated as One Hundred Years of Solitude , Harper & Row, 1970.

Isabel viendo llover en Macondo (novella), Editorial Estuario, 1967.

La increible y triste historia de la candida Erendira y su abuela desalmada (short stories), Barral Editores, 1972.

El negro que hizo esperar a los angeles (short stories), Ediciones Alfil (Montevideo, Uraguay), 1972.

Ojos de perro azul (short stories), Equisditorial, 1972.

Leaf Storm and Other Stories, Harper & Row, 1972.

El otoño del patriarca (novel), Plaza & Janes Editores, 1975; translated as The Autumn of the Patriarch, Harper & Row, 1976.

Todos los cuentos de Gabriel García Márquez: 1947-1972 (collected short stories), Plaza & Janés Editores, 1975.

Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories, Harper & Row, 1978.

Dos novelas de Macondo, Casa de las Americas, 1980.

Crónica de una muerte anunciada (novel), La Oveja Negra, 1981; translated as Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Knopf, 1983.

El rastro de tu sangre en la nieve: El verano feliz de la senora Forbes, W. Dampier Editores (Bogota, Colombia), 1982.

El secuestro: Guion cinematografico (unfilmed screenplay), Oveja Negra (Bogota, Colombia), 1982.

Viva Sandino (play), Editorial Nueva Nicaragua, 1982.

Eréndira (film script), Les Films du Triangle, 1983. Collected Stories, Harper & Row, 1984.

El amor en los tiempos del cólera (novel), Oveja Negra, 1985; translated as Love in the Time of Cholera, Knopf, 1988.

A Time to Die (film script), ICA Cinema, 1988.

Diatribe of Love against a Seated Man (play, first produced at Cervantes Theater, Buenos Aires, 1988), Arango Editores, 1994.

El general en su labertino (novel), Mondadori, 1989; translated as The General in His Labyrinth, Knopf, 1990.

Collected novellas, HarperCollins, 1990.

Doce cuentos peregrinos, Mondadori, 1992; translated as Strange Pilgrims: Twelve Stories, Knopf, 1993.

The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World: A Tale for Children, Creative Education, 1993.

Del amor y otros demonios (novel), Mondador, 1994; translated as Of Love and Other Demons, Knopf, 1995.

(Contributor) The Picador Book of Latin American Stories, Picador (New York, NY), 1998.

Individually bound series of single stories, including El verano feliz de la senora Forbes, illustrated by Carmen Sole Vendrell, Groupo Editorial Norma (Bogota, Colombia), 1999.

Memorias de Mis Putas Tristes (Memories of My Sad Whore), Knopf, 2004.

(With Mario Vargas Llosa) La novela en America Latina: Dialogo, Carlos Milla Batres, 1968.

Relato de un naufrago (journalistic pieces), Tusquets Editor, 1970; translated as The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, Knopf, 1986.

Cuando era feliz e indocumentado (journalistic pieces), Ediciones El Ojo de Camello, 1973.

Operacion Carlota (essays) 1977.

Periodismo militante (journalistic pieces), Son de Maquina (Bogota, Colombia), 1978.

De viaje por los paises socialistas: 90 dias en la "Cortina de hierro" (journalistic pieces), Ediciones Macondo (Colombia), 1978.

Cronicas y reportajes (journalistic pieces), Oveja Negra, 1978.

(Contributor) Los sandanistas, Oveja Negra, 1979.

(Contributor) Asi es Caracas, edited by Soledad Mendoza, Editorial Ateneo de Caracas, 1980.

Obra periodistica (journalistic pieces), edited by Jacques Gilard, Bruguera, Volume 1: Textos constenos, 1981, Volumes 2-3: Entre cachacos, 1982, Volume 4: De Europa y America (1955-1960), 1983.

El olor de la guayaba: Conversaciones con Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza (interviews), Oveja Negra, 1982; translated as The Fragrance of Guava, 1983.

(With Guillermo Nolasco-Juarez) Persecucion y muerte de minorias: dos perspectives, Juarez Editor, 1984.

La aventura de Miguel Littin, clandestino en Chile: Un reportaje, Editorial Sudamericana, 1986; English translation by Asa Zatz published as Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littin, Holt (New York, NY), 1987.

(Contributor) La Democracia y la paz en America Latina, Editorial El Buho, 1986.

Primeros reportajes, Consorcio de Ediciones Capriles, 1990.

Notas de prensa, 1980-1984, Mondadori (Madrid, Spain), 1991.

(Author of introduction) An Encounter with Fidel: An Interview, by Gianni Mina, Ocean Press, 1991.

Elogio de la utopia: Una entrevista de Nahuel Maciel, Cronista Ediciones, 1992.

News of a Kidnapping, Knopf, 1997.

For the Sake of a Country Within Reach of the Children, Villegas Editores, 1998.

(Author of introduction) Castro, Fidel, My Early Years, LPC Group, 1998.

(With Reynaldo Gonzales) Cubano 100%, Charta, 1998.

Vivir Para Contarla (title means To Live to Tell It ) (memoir), Colombia, 2002; published as Living to Tell the Tale, Knopf (New York, NY), 2003.

Bell, Michael, Gabriel García Márquez: Solitude and Solidarity, St. Martin's Press, 1993.

Bell-Villada, Gene H., García Márquez: The Man and His Work, University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, vol. 82, Gale, 1999.

Dictionary of Hispanic Biography, Gale, 1996.

Dolan, Sean, Gabriel García Márquez, Chelsea House, 1994.

Fiddian, Robin W., García Márquez, Longman, 1995.

Janes, Regina, Gabriel García Márquez: Revolutions in Wonderland, University of Missouri Press, 1981.

McGuirk, Bernard and Richard Cardwell, editors, Gabriel García Márquez: New Readings, Cambridge University Press, 1988.

McMurray, George R., Gabriel García Márquez, Ungar, 1977.

Wood, Michael, Gabriel García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude, Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Periodicals

New Yorker, February 19-26, 2001.

New York Times, June 19, 1997; March 3, 1999.

New York Times Book Review, September 29, 1968; March 8, 1970; February 20, 1972; October 31, 1976; July 16, 1978; September 16, 1978; November 11, 1979; November 16, 1980; December 5, 1982, p. 7, pp. 60-61; March 27, 1983; April 7, 1985; April 27, 1986; August 9, 1987; April 10, 1988, p. 1, pp. 48-49; September 16, 1990, pp. 1, 30; November 7, 1993, p. 9; May 28, 1995, p. 8; June 15, 1997.

Time, March 16, 1970; November 1, 1976; July 10, 1978; November 1, 1982; March 7, 1983; December 31, 1984; April 14, 1986; May 22, 1995; June 2, 1997, p. 79.

Times Literary Supplement, July 7, 1995.

Washington Post, October 14, 2001, p. A28.

World Literature Today, Winter 1982; Winter 1991, p. 85; Autumn 1993, pp. 782-83.

"Gabriel García Márquez," CNN.com, http://www.cnn.com/2000/books/news (December 14, 2004).

"Gabriel García Márquez" New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com (December 14, 2004).

"Gabriel García Márquez," Nobelprize.org, http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1982/index.html (December 14, 2004).

"Gabriel García Márquez," Publishers Weekly, http://www.publishersweekly.com (December 14, 2004).

"García Márquez joins protest against new visa rules," Guardian, http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,458994,00.html (December 14, 2004).

"Writer stays true to beleaguered Castro," Guardian, http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,946285,00.html (December 14, 2004).

—Elizabeth Shostak

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Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez) was a Colombian short story writer, novelist, journalist, and screenwriter. Throughout Latin America, he is known affectionately as Gabito or Gabo. He is regarded as one of the most significant writers of the twentieth century. 

In 1972, he was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. He also received Nobel Prizes in Literature in 1982. He followed a self-directed education that causes him to leave law school and start his career in journalism.

Even though Garcia Marquez started his literary career as a journalist and wrote many short stories and non-fiction works, he is best known for his novel, particularly One Hundred Years of Solitude , Love in the Time of Cholera, and Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The works of Garcia Marquez achieved commercial success and significant critical acclaim. 

He is mostly known for popularizing a literary genre/style known as magic realism. The style of magic realism uses magical events and elements in realistic and ordinary situations. Some of his works are set in the fictional town/village Macondo, which is inspired by his birthplace Arcataca. Most of his works explore the theme of solitude.

The president of Colombia called Garcia Marques, “the greatest Colombian ever lived” in his death in April 1014.

A Short Biography of Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia, on 6 th March 1927. He was the eldest of 12 children. His father was a telegraph operator, a postal clerk, and an itinerant pharmacist. His parents moved to another place when Garcia Marquez was eight years old. 

His maternal grandparents left him to be raised in a large tumble-down house. His grandfather, Nicholas Marquez Mejia, was a liberal activist. He also served as a colonel during the Thousand Days War in Columbia. Garcia’s grandmother believed in superstition and magic. She filled the head of her grandson with the folk tales and superstitions, spirits and dancing ghosts.

Writing Career

Garcia Marquez was admitted to a Jesuit College. He started studying law at the National University of Bogota in 1946. Garcia sent a collection of his short stories to the editor of the liberal magazine “El Espectador” when the editor claims that Colombia has no more talented young writers. The editor published the collection of short stories as “Eyes of a Blue Dog.”

This proved to be a brief burst of success. This was interrupted by the assassination of the president Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. In such a chaotic condition following the assignation of Colombian president, Garcia Marquez refuses to become an investigative reporter and journalist in the Caribbean region. It was a role that he would never part with. 

Exile from Colombia

Garcia Marques aired a news story about a sailor who survived a shipwreck of a Columbian Navy destroyer. Previously, the shipwreck had been credited to a storm. The sailor then reported, which badly put illegal imports from the US, came loose and hit eight crew members. 

As a result of the breaking news story, a scandal started. The scandal caused Garcia Marques to exile to Europe. In Europe, Garcia continued to write magazine reports, short stories, and news.

He published his first novel Leafstorm in 1955. He had written the novel seven years earlier, but he was unable to find a publisher for it.

Marriage and Family

In 1958, Garcia Marquez married Mercedes Barcha Pardo. Both of them had two children Rodrigo and Gonzalo.

In 1967, Garcia Marquez published One Hundred Years of Solitude. The novel is his most famous work. He got the idea for the novel when he was driving to Acapulco from Mexico City. While on the script, he went into debt for $12,000, the novel sold more than 25 million copies in the next 30 years. It has been translated into more than 30 languages.

Political Activism

Garcia Marquez, for most of his adult life, lived as an exile from Colombia. The exile was most self-imposed because of his frustration and anger over the violence in his country. Garcia Marquez remained a lifelong socialist. 

He was a friend of Fidel Castro. He always sustained his personal ties with the Colombian communist party, despite the fact that he never joined the party as a member. He received the Iron Curtain to the Balkan States from a Venezuelan newspaper. After reading this, he learned that remote from the ideal Communist life, the people in Eastern Europe are living in terror.

Due to his leftist inclinations, he was repeatedly denied tourist visas to the US. He was also criticized by the activist at home that he is not totally committed to communism. He first visited the US when President Bill Clinton sent an invitation to Martha’s Vineyard.

Later Novels

Augustin Pinochet, a dictator, came in power in Chile in 1975. Garcia Marques wore that until Pinochet is gone, he will never write a novel. For the next 17 years, Pinochet remained in power. In 1981, Garcia Marquez acknowledged that he was letting a dictator censor him.

In 1981, he published Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The story is an account of the horrific murder of one of his childhood friends. The merry, peaceful, and open-hearted protagonist of the novel is hacked to death. The whole town knows that the murder will occur, but they cannot prevent it, despite the fact that the town does not consider him guilty of the crime. He has been accused of a plague of inability to act.

Garcia Marques published Love in the Time of Cholera in 1986. It is a romantic narrative of the two lovers who meet in warfare but cannot reconnect for almost 50 years. The world Cholera in the novel refers to both the disease prevailing at the time and extreme warfare.

Death and Legacy

Garcia Marques was diagnosed with Lymphoma in 1999. However, he continued to write until he published Memories of My Melancholy Whores in 2004. The book received mixed reviews and was banned in Iran. He sank into dementia and died in Mexico City on 17 th April 2014. 

Besides his unforgettable prose works, Marques Garcia set up an International Film School near Havana, and on the Caribbean coast, he set up a school of journalism. He also brought the attention of the world to the literary sense of Latin Americans.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Writing Style

Most of the stories of Garcia Marques revolve around the eccentricity of the Colombian Caribbean region. Even though the writing of Garcia Marques has certain features like humor, he does not have any clear and predetermined style. 

In an interview, Garcia says that he tries to make a different path in every book. He asserts that one does not choose a style or discover the best style for the theme. The subject and mood of the times determine the style. If someone tries to choose or use a particular style that is not suitable, it does not work.

It seems that Garcia Marques leaves or does not mention apparently important things or events. He forces the readers into a participatory role in the development of the story. For instance, the main characters are not given names in No One Writes to the Colonel. 

This sort of practice was used in Greek Tragedies in the plays Oedipus Rex and Antigone in which important events occur offstage, and the audience is left to imagine.

Realism and Magical Realism

Magic realism is a type of narrative in which the fantastic elements blend with the realistic picture of ordinary life. Garcia Marques wrote about the fantastical element in his works with an ironic sense of humor, unmistakable, and honest prose style.

One of the important themes in the works of Garcia Marquez is reality. For his early works, he said that: “Nobody Writes to the Colonel, In Evil Hour, and Big Mama’s Funeral all reflect the reality of life in Colombia and this theme determines the rational structure of the books. I don’t regret having written them, but they belong to a kind of premeditated literature that offers too static and exclusive a vision of reality .”

For the rest of his works, he appears to be experimenting with traditional approaches to reality. He tells the most unusual and the most frightful things with a deadpan expression. For example, in One Hundred Years of Solitude, a character both spiritually and physically ascends into heaven while she is hanging laundry clothes. The style of his works fit into the marvelous realm and was labeled as magical realism.

The style of Garcia Marquez has been understood in an alternative way by literary critic Michael Bell. He criticized the category of magical realism for being exoticizing and dichotomizing and says that “ what is really at stake is a psychological suppleness which is able to inhabit unsentimental the daytime world while remaining open to the promptings of those domains which modern culture has, by its own inner logic, necessarily marginalised or repressed.”

Garcia Marques talks about magic realism in his works by saying that the way one treats reality in their book is called magic realism. He also says that European people are able to see the magic realism in his book, but unable to see the reality behind it. This happens because their rationalism prevents them from seeing the reality is not something restricted to eggs and tomatoes.

Literary Themes in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Writings

In most of the works of Garcia Marques, solitude is a major theme. For instance, the novel Love in the Time of Cholera explores the theme of the solitude of the individual and solitude of mankind. It is portrayed by the solitude of love and being in love.

When Garcia was asked for the roots of this overriding emotion, as it is the theme of all of his books, he says that it is everybody’s problem. Everyone expresses in his own way. The feeling of solitude is pervaded by so many writers, and some of the writers express it unconsciously.

Another important theme in Garcia’s works is the recurrent setting of the fictional village Macondo. The cultural, historical, and geographical reference to this place is Garcia Marquez’s home town Aracataca, Colombia. However, the representation of the fictional village is not restricted to a specific area. 

Garcia Marques asserts that Macondo is not simply a physical location or place. It is a state of mind that allows one to see what he or she wants to see and how he or she wants to see.

Some of his stories are not set in Macondo. Still, there is a constant lack of specificity to the location of the stories. Even if the stories are set in an Andean hinterland or on a Caribbean coastline, the settings are unspecified. They are in accordance with Garcia’s attempt to apprehend a wide-ranging regional myth instead of any particular political event.

In the literary world, the fictional town of Macondo has become well-known. The inhabitants and the geography of Macondo are constantly evoked by politicians, tourists, and teachers. It makes it difficult to believe that the place is just an absolute creation.

In the novel Leaf Storm, Garcia Marques shows the realities of Banana Boom in the village Macondo. This includes a period of great wealth when US companies were present and a period of depression when US companies leave. Similarly, One Hundred Years of Solitude is set in Macondo and narrates the complete one hundred years of the town from its foundation to its doom.

La Violencia

La Violencia is the violence and “a brutal civil war between conservatives and liberals that lasted into the 1960s, causing the deaths of several hundred thousand Colombians”. In some of the works such as No One Writes to the Colonel, Leaf Storm, and In Evil Hour, Garcia Marquez refers to this period. 

In other works, there are subtle references to the violence as well. For example, his characters appear to be living in a different unjust situation like press censorship, curfew, and underground newspapers.

Even though In Evil Hour is not among the notable novels of Garcia Marques, it is famous for the portrayal of la Violencia. It is also known for its split portrayal of social collapse resulting from b la Violencia.

Despite the fact that Garcia Marques portrays the injustices and corrupt nature of time in la Violencia, he does not use his fictional work as a platform for political marketing. He asserts that a revolutionary writer is obliged to write well. The ideal novel, for Garcia Marques, is the one that moves the reader by its social and political context, and it must have the power to penetrate reality and expose the other side of reality.

Works Of Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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Clamoring for Life

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Until August

Many years later, as I faced the deadline for writing this review, I was to remember that distant afternoon when Gabriel García Márquez showed me the Spanish manuscript of Chronicle of a Death Foretold and then gently refused to let me read the novel until its forthcoming publication.

We were spending a week together in August 1981 at the Mexican resort of Cocoyoc, along with eight other jurors awarding a literary prize for the best book on militarism in Latin America, 1 and Gabo (as everyone called him) was bubbling with enthusiasm at having completed what he considered his masterpiece. “I can’t let you even have a peek,” he said to me with a smile both impish and contrite, “because I’d get into trouble with the two women who rule my life: Mercedes and Carmen.” He was referring, respectively, to his wife and his agent, whose authority over him was well known. “I was brought up,” he added, “in a household full of strong, decisive, intelligent women and learned early on to respect them more than anything in this world or the next one.”

I was not surprised, as he had frequently expressed similar sentiments. What seems noteworthy today, as one reads his posthumous novel Until August , is that despite his reiterated reverence for the female sex, he never—until now, that is—published a long work of fiction in which a woman was the uncontested protagonist.

Exceptional, fully developed female characters abound in his work: the multifarious mothers and grandmothers, sisters and daughters and lovers of the Buendía family in One Hundred Years of Solitude , as well as scores of others in book after book. And yet, endowed though their mostly tragic lives may be with dignity and agency, they live in a world forged by machos, basically patriarchs, large or small, who determine priorities through their stubborn search for power or their unrelenting lust. The women are there to fix the messes these men leave behind and to service their male nostalgia and desires.

This is the world from which the protagonist of Until August , forty-six-year-old Ana Magdalena Bach, strives to escape. For the last eight years she has been visiting the tomb of her mother, Micaela, on an island off the Caribbean coast of Colombia. On each sweltering August 16, the anniversary of her death, Ana Magdalena has cleaned the grave, laid gladioli on it, told Micaela the latest news, and then returned to the husband on the mainland to whom she has been contentedly married for twenty-seven years. But on the occasion that opens the novel, she engages in a one-night stand with a stranger of consummate sexual prowess whose name she never finds out. That first isolated act of adultery takes place almost reluctantly, as if it were someone else’s erotic adventure, but subsequent trysts in the following years, always with a different man, open her to the realization of what has been missing in her middle-aged life, as she grows closer to death with each wearisome second that ticks by.

García Márquez deftly registers the fluctuations of Ana Magdalena’s joys, reservations, and disappointments on this journey of self-discovery. After that first encounter, her sense of satisfaction with what initially seemed a transitory lapse is undermined once she awakens. To her horror, the departed lover has left a twenty-dollar bill between the pages of a book she was reading (appropriately, Bram Stoker’s Dracula) . Rather than the bodice-ripping sex, it is this act of turning her into a prostitute that becomes the defining moment of her odyssey. It troubles her identity as the free woman she believes herself to be, breaks down the romantic illusion with which she embarked on this illicit rendezvous, and she spends the rest of the novel trying to efface that gesture of subjection.

Ana Magdalena returns home oddly changed, looking at her former life with “chastened eyes.” But she will need an ongoing crisis with her clueless but quite wonderful husband, and several more visits to the island and nights of both successful and frustrated love with anonymous gentlemen, to figure out where this rebellion against conventional marriage is leading her.

From the very first words that describe her aboard the ferry that takes her to the island, Ana Magdalena comes across as strikingly different from many of the other female characters that populate García Márquez’s fiction. Some of them are bursting with sensual fertility and joy, others stew in the lonely swamp of their bitterness, but almost all are defined by their lack of an education, whereas Ana Magdalena belongs to a cultured and privileged upper-middle-class elite. The second of her carnal unions occurs in a luxury Carlton hotel, one of the “towering cliffs of glass” that she witnessed going up “every year while the village grew more and more impoverished.” Besides a bar, a cabaret, and a solicitous staff, there is, notably, ice-cold air-conditioning in her suite on the eighteenth floor.

That artificial air establishes how remote her world is from those of García Márquez’s previous novels. The famous opening line of his most famous work, One Hundred Year of Solitude (“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice”), implies a premodern country where ice is a marvel. It is that past full of prodigies that García Márquez riotously mined all his literary life, without ever writing a novel set in his own time. With Until August he dared to. In the late twentieth century, on a planet where flying machines perform the hourly miracle of defying gravity, there is no room for levitating priests or damsels who ascend to heaven as a sign of their purity. What besieges Ana Magdalena is the crushing reality of the mundane from which there seems to be no escape, even if, when she returns home from her first adventure, she has the momentary impression that nature itself has responded to her earth-shattering infidelity:

In a panic she asked Filomena, their lifelong housekeeper, what disaster had occurred in her absence to keep the birds from singing in their cages and why her planters of flowers from the Amazon, hanging baskets of ferns, and garlands of blue vines had disappeared from the inside courtyard.

In any of García Márquez’s previous novels, this would be the chance for a supernatural and mysterious response from the earth and the air to the alteration in someone’s existence. Here the explanation is rational and ordinary. She had given instructions for the plants to be taken to the patio to enjoy the rain: “It would take several days before Ana Magdalena became aware that the changes were not to the world but to herself.” She is the vast, enigmatic territory that she must confusedly explore if she is to emerge from her own labyrinth of solitude.

But there is still a place for magic, even in a disenchanted world. In the last chapter the words “magic” and “magician” are slipped in repeatedly, hinting that something extraordinary is about to happen. This moment of transfiguration happens in a cemetery, a location that has been central to García Márquez’s literature from the very start. His first novel, Leaf Storm (1955), is a Faulknerian retelling of Antigone . A colonel in Macondo is determined to bury the corpse of a doctor who, because he refused to treat those wounded in Colombia’s civil strife, has been left to rot in his house. Macondo begins as a paradise in One Hundred Years of Solitude , until one by one all its inhabitants are dead and the town itself becomes a vast graveyard, mirroring the “windstorm of fatality” that García Márquez experienced when he returned as a young adult to Aracataca, the town where he was born and grew up until the age of eight. 2 More and more funerals pile up in The Autumn of the Patriarch , The General in His Labyrinth , and Love in the Time of Cholera .

It is apt, then, that his posthumous novel should climax in a graveyard. When Ana Magdalena visits her mother’s tomb for the last time, it is covered with flowers, brought, the caretaker informs her, several times a year by an elderly gentleman who he presumed was a family member. It is a “blazing revelation”: her mother had a lover! That is why Micaela would travel to the island during her last years, why she insisted on being buried there. Though shaken by the news, Ana Magdalena does not feel sad “but rather encouraged by the realization that the miracle of her life was to have continued that of her dead mother.” She awaits a sign that her mother is blessing her from the grave, but none comes. That night, having rejected another possible lover, she “cried herself to sleep furious with herself for the misfortune of being a woman in a man’s world.” 3

But it is not in frustration that the book ends. The next morning Ana Magdalena decides to exhume her mother’s body. And now the sign she was awaiting does indeed arrive. She sees herself “in the open casket as if she were looking in a full-length mirror,” but she also feels seen by her mother “from death, loved and wept for.” It is a double encounter—with her future dead self and with her mother still somehow alive—that allows her to say “goodbye forever to her one-night strangers and to the hours and hours of uncertainties that remained of herself scattered around the island.” Carrying the sack of bones, Ana Magdalena returns to the mainland and her loving husband. It is not clear what she will do next, only that her midlife crisis is over, thanks to the intercession not of another man but of another woman, whose remains will now accompany her until the day she herself dies.

García Márquez once told me—at least this is how I remember the conversation 4 —about entire villages in Colombia that hauled their cemeteries with them as they migrated, trying to keep some semblance of the past alive in the midst of the multiple catastrophes that had uprooted them. Those bones were a way to provide stability in a landscape where everything had become unfamiliar. When Ana Magdalena does something similar with what is left of her mother’s corpse, she is enacting the same sort of ritual as those villagers (and other García Márquez characters 5 ), finding an anchor that reminds readers that our ancestors have much to teach us if we could only learn how to listen to them.

However, though this closing image of a woman who has lost her way and been reconciled with life through her dead mother is emotionally gratifying, the last lines of the novel feel truncated and anticlimactic. Anticipating her husband’s horror at the sack of bones she is bringing home, Ana Magdalena tells him not to be afraid, that her mother understands: “She’s the only one who could. What’s more, I think she’d already understood when she decided to be buried on that island.”

These sentences that present Micaela as a kind of oracle who has forecast her daughter’s destiny are reminiscent of many of García Márquez’s most felicitous intuitions. But compared with any of the brilliant endings for which he is known, they seem inconclusive and awkwardly phrased. In No One Writes to the Colonel (1968), for instance, the impoverished colonel, who has been waiting for decades for his veteran’s pension, informs his wife that he won’t sell the rooster that might win a cockfight forty-four days hence and help them survive. When his wife insists that the rooster might lose and asks meanwhile what they will eat, his answer is memorable:

It had taken the colonel seventy-five years—the seventy-five years of his life, minute by minute—to reach this moment. He felt pure, explicit, invincible at the moment when he replied: “Shit.” 6

Almost fifty years later, on July 5, 2004, already battling memory loss, García Márquez gave tentative approval to a definitive version of Until August . Tentative, because he added, “Grand final OK. Info about her CH 2. NB : probably Final ch / Is it the best?” My guess is that he had in mind those other sublime endings and was concerned that perhaps the last words he had ascribed to his female protagonist did not afford her the consummation she deserved.

One can theorize, of course, that this indecisive ending was what he had planned: to purposefully preclude an unforgettable sentence or a totalizing gesture as the character said farewell, thus sidestepping his often expressed aspiration that each of his works be a “total” novel. In his only novel to focus exclusively on a female figure, was he possibly grasping for the ambiguous endings of Virgina Woolf, an author he venerated? And yet there are those prescient words—“Is it the best?”—as well as several inconsistencies and redundancies in the text, all of which imply distress at publicly producing anything that did not meet his exacting standards. That lingering doubt certainly gnawed at him, because his last instructions to his sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo, about what to do with Until August were: “This book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.”

For many years it rested among his papers in the vaults of the University of Texas, Austin, exclusively available to visiting scholars, and was not rescued from obscurity until his heirs belatedly decided to publish it posthumously. They argued not only that they found wonders in the book but that when their father had ordered its destruction, his faculties had diminished to the point that he could not appreciate its merits.

When I heard that one surviving literary work by García Márquez was to be offered to his readers, what came almost immediately to mind was the first short story he published, when he was barely twenty, written the night after he read Kafka’s Metamorphosis . “The Third Resignation” (1947) features a character who, though dead, is able to observe what happens to his body as it decays over the course of several decades. At first he is delighted to find himself left alone with his solitude, his senses intact, but toward the end “his limbs would not respond to his call. He could not express himself and that…struck terror in him; the greatest terror of his life and of his death. That he would be buried alive.”

I like to speculate that the youthful García Márquez was visited, while writing that story back in 1947, by a premonition (he who adored forewarnings and cycles and repetitions) about what might someday happen to his own future self: he might find himself in a position akin to being buried alive, unable to express his innermost feeling.

Did his sons, then, make a mistake by going against their father’s wishes, by deciding what are to be the final words of his to see the light of day, remnants with which he was not fully satisfied? Predictably, the appearance of Until August has stirred a considerable amount of controversy, with many arguing that it is a disservice to allow such an unfinished minor work to circulate.

At the end of their preface to the novel, his sons justify this betrayal (they agree that the book is incomplete) by declaring that they have “decided to put his readers’ pleasure ahead of all other considerations. If they are delighted, it’s possible Gabo might forgive us.” I found this plea for forgiveness poignant, albeit simultaneously a way of shifting onto readers the responsibility for the book’s publication. Even in the unlikely case that every reader were delighted, the question still remains of how García Márquez (the writer and not the loving father) would have reacted to the appearance of this posthumous novel, whether—or not—it completes his trajectory as a writer.

Unique though Ana Magdalena is to the canon of García Márquez, he had often narrated the plight of female characters from their perspective, if not in novels then in a number of accomplished short stories that span his literary career. In “The Woman Who Came at Six O’Clock” (1950), a prostitute convinces the restaurant owner José to provide an alibi for a murder she may have committed. In “Tuesday Siesta” (1962), a mother brings flowers to the grave of her thieving dead son, defying a hostile and possibly murderous town. In “The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother” (1972), the twelve-year-old Eréndira, inadvertently responsible for a fire that annihilates all her grandmother’s possessions, is prostituted in perpetuity by the old woman to pay for the damage. And in “Maria dos Prazeres” (1979), an aging whore preparing for death in Barcelona finds love with an adolescent boy. Although it must have been tempting, García Márquez rightly declined to extend each of these tales into a novel. Their heroines fit flawlessly in their circumscribed universe.

This was how Ana Magdalena Bach was born. She initially appeared in two short stories, one of them published in 1999 in the Colombian journal Cambio (and later in translation in The New Yorker ) and the other read that same year by the author at the Casa de América in Madrid, which would evolve into the first and third chapters of Until August . What was so fascinating about this particular woman at this particular moment in the life of the aging writer that he felt compelled to stretch these two chapters into a lengthier work? What made her a character who, like Clarissa Dalloway, “clamored for more life”? 7

García Márquez zealously projected onto his final protagonist some of his most intimate tastes. Her name comes from the second wife of his most beloved composer, whose cello sonata he once said he would take to a desert island if he had but one choice. Indeed, she is surrounded by men in her family (father, husband, son) who are dedicated to classical music, and Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Copland, and Bartók are played at some point during the novel. But like her creator, she is also entranced by songs and dances (boleros, danzones, waltzes, salsa, jazz) that provide the right atmosphere for courtship and the torrid couplings that will eventually take place. This mix of high and low culture mirrors García Márquez’s embrace of a dual heritage that allowed him to appeal to both postmodern sensibilities and a popular audience, bridging the divide that has bedeviled Latin American literature from its origins. 8

In fact, literary hints are strewn throughout the novel. The title is an homage to Light in August by William Faulkner, the author who most influenced him. Ana Magdalena, a high school teacher who is only a couple of courses away from graduating with a degree in literature, assiduously reads the writers who are García Márquez’s favorites: Camus, Hemingway, Defoe, Bradbury, Greene, Borges (and Stoker). And it is no coincidence that Micaela, the dead mother who helps her daughter read reality in a different way, was “a famous Montessori teacher,” because it was just such a teacher in a Montessori school, Rosa Elena Ferguson, who taught the young Gabito to read and instilled in him a love for poetry and the Spanish language that would be central to his vocation, and who was even, it has been said, his first love.

But although Until August is a remarkable book, it does not find its author at the peak of his abilities. It is praiseworthy but not the masterpiece it could have become if he had not been ailing and could have afforded his female alter ego the sort of treatment Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary received. And yet, maybe it did befall him after all at exactly the right time, when he had published what were thought to be his last two novels. Both of them feature young girls who cast a spell over much older men. In Of Love and Other Demons (1994), thirteen-year-old Sierva María besots the thirty-six-year-old priest Cayetano Delaura, tasked with exorcising the demons presumably inside her body. And in Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004), it is a fourteen-year-old virgin whom the unnamed narrator decides to bed to celebrate his ninetieth birthday but ends up falling in love with—platonically, to my relief.

Such a fixation in an aging writer had significant roots in his early life, as he first met his future wife, Mercedes, when she was nine and he was fourteen and resolutely determined to marry her, a situation that was transferred to Colonel Aureliano Buendía and nine-year-old Remedios Moscote and reappears in other works. This is not the place to delve into the deeper Latin American motives, personal and social, behind such a perverse male quest for innocence and purification through the bodies of prepubescent girls, 9 but it is evident that one of Ana Magdalena’s attractions must have been how far she is from both of the juvenile female protagonists of the preceding novels. I conjecture that García Márquez was glad to be celebrating not the sort of girl he had been infatuated with sixty years earlier but the sort of mature woman with whom he had spent his adulthood and whom he so admired. He was a lifelong denouncer of patriarchy, blaming machismo and the oppression of women for the violence and misdevelopment of Latin America. 10 How liberating, then, to give that budding female character the chance to blossom fully—with all her dreams, disconcerting desires, and transgressive sexuality—in a novel where she discerns the freedom that so few of his characters attain.

It is heartening that even as his memory began to fade, García Márquez risked setting out for new horizons. I can only hope that he would not have wanted his sons to condemn Ana Magdalena Bach to the flames of oblivion no matter how imperfectly she might have been wrought. Surely he would have been dismayed at becoming, from beyond death, an accomplice to the erasure of that struggle of hers to defeat that very death. Let me say, then, to Gabo’s sons: very few old friends of your father are still alive, so I’ll take it upon myself to commend you for having betrayed his last wishes and bequeathed to readers one more memorable woman, this enchanting homage to freedom.

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Ariel Dorfman, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Literature at Duke, is the author of the play Death and the Maiden and the novel The Suicide Museum . His novel Allegro will be published in English next year. (May 2024)

See my “My Memories of Gabriel García Márquez,” The Nation , May 26, 2014.  ↩

See the hallucinatory first chapter of his autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale (Knopf, 2003), and Alma Guillermoprieto, “Ghosts of Aracataca,” The New York Review , November 2, 2023.   ↩

My translation. The translator of Until August , Anne McLean, whose renderings of Javier Cercas and Juan Gabriel Vásquez I have found unimpeachable, makes a mistake here: the Spanish desgracia means “misfortune,” not “disgrace.”   ↩

See my “The Wandering Bigamists of Language,” Other Septembers, Many Americas: Selected Provocations, 1980–2004 (Seven Stories, 2004).   ↩

For instance, the eleven-year-old orphan Rebeca, from One Hundred Years of Solitude , who arrives at the Buendía household carrying a bag of her parents’ bones and who will only manage to find peace years later when they are finally buried.  ↩

For a further interpretation of this incident, see my review, “La vorágine de los fantasmas,” Ercilla 1.617 (June 1, 1966), p. 34.  ↩

The phrase comes from Merve Emre’s insights into how Mrs. Dalloway evolved from fragments and a short story into Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece. See her The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway (Liveright, 2021).   ↩

For an elaboration of this divide see my “Someone Writes to the Future: Meditations on Hope and Violence in García Márquez,” Some Write to the Future: Essays on Contemporary Latin American Fiction (Duke University Press, 1991).  ↩

There is a judicious analysis in Gerald Martin’s indispensable biography, Gabriel García Márquez: A Life (Knopf, 2009), pp. 530–532.   ↩

Perhaps his pithiest definition of machismo was in a conversation with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza: “Machismo in men and in women is merely the usurpation of other people’s rights.” Gabriel García Márquez: The Last Interview and Other Conversations , edited by David Streitfeld (Melville House, 2015), p. 38.  ↩

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Netflix releases teaser for Gabriel Garcia Marquez's '100 Years Of Solitude'

Thursday, 18 Apr 2024

Netflix recently released a sneak peek of its TV series adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years Of Solitude, coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the Nobel Prize-winning author's death.

Published in 1967, the novel is considered a masterpiece that defined "magical realism" as a literary genre and has been translated into 46 languages.

It centres around seven generations of the Buendia family in the fictional Colombian town of Macondo.

"In the mythical town of Macondo, the Buendia family confronts a curse, madness and impossible love," the streaming platform said on X.

No date has been given for the release of the 16-episode series, which was first announced in 2019 and filmed in Garcia Marquez's home country, Colombia. Netflix said on its website the series is coming in 2024.

"In this sneak peek, we hear Aureliano Babilonia as he reads from the mythical diary of Melquiades and are transported to Macondo to witness Colonel Aureliano Buendia standing before a firing squad while he remembers that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice," Netflix said in a statement.

"What follows are breathtaking scenes of Jose Arcadio Buendia and Ursula Iguaran's journey in search of happiness, fleeing the curse placed upon their lineage."

Garcia Marquez was a leading member of the "Latin American boom" of authors of the 1960s and 1970s that included Nobel laureates Octavio Paz of Mexico and Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru.

One Hundred Years Of Solitude has sold some 50 million copies worldwide.

Rodrigo Garcia and Gonzalo Garcia Barcha, the sons of the late author, were executive producers on the show.

"For decades our father was reluctant to sell the film rights" to the book "because he believed that it could not be made under the time constraints of a feature film, or that producing it in a language other than Spanish would not do it justice," Garcia said in 2019.

But in the current "golden age" of TV series, with quality writing and directing "and the acceptance by worldwide audiences of programs in foreign languages, the time could not be better," he said.

The series was filmed entirely in Spanish, and directed by Colombian Laura Mora and Argentine Alex Garcia Lopez.

" One Hundred Years Of Solitude is one of the most ambitious productions in Latin America to date," said Netflix.

The series comes after the author's relatives in March posthumously released his final novel, Until August. – AFP

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Tags / Keywords: Gabriel Garcia Marquez , book , 100 Years Of Solitude , Netflix , series , teaser

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Who is Gabriel García Marquez? Netflix One Hundred Years of Solitude teaser release

A Nobel Prize-winning Colombian novelist, Gabriel García Márquez, authored a book called One Hundred Years of Solitude . The book came out in 1967 and is an admired piece that has been translated into 46 languages. The novel revolves around the lineage of seven generations of the Buendía family in the imaginary Colombian town of Macondo.

On April 17, 2024, Netflix premiered a preview of their TV series based on García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude as part of commemorating the 10th anniversary of his death. The 16-episode series, placed in Colombia, is co-operatively produced with the author's sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo Garcia.

The teaser focuses on Aureliano Babilonia's reading from Melquiades' journal, revealing the image of Macondo with the scenes of José Arcadio Buendia and Ursula Iguaran traveling in search of happiness.

Who is the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude ?

The author of One Hundred Years of Solitude is Gabriel García Márquez, a Nobel prize-winning Colombian writer. He is considered one of the main proponents of magical realism. First published in 1967, this novel is a family saga .

It covers many generations and takes place in the imaginary settlement of Macondo. The author was born on March 6, 1927, and died on April 17, 2014.

Gabriel García Márquez was a prominent member of the region's Latin American boom, a literary movement that included Octavio Paz of Mexico and Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru. He is known for his works which blend magical realism and political commentary .

What is One Hundred Years of Solitude about?

One Hundred Years of Solitude starts with José Arcadio Buendia, the family patriarch, and his wife, Ursula Iguarán, coming to Macondo, the town they took as their home. José Arcadio Buendía is an adventurous and keen scientist by nature. On the other hand, Ursula Iguaran is extremely practical, and her intuition is remarkable.

They fear bearing children with pig's tails, a fear that lingers over the book. Their sons, José Arcadio and Aureliano, inherit their father's strengths and weaknesses. José Arcadio becomes the ultimate macho and dies mysteriously after usurping lands, and Aureliano becomes one of Macondo's greatest and most notorious rebels.

One Hundred Years of Solitude develops through seven generations of Buendías, from the foundation of the town of Macondo to its decline. The town, which was once a remote Eden, brings in the outside world during the period of civil war, and death and bloodshed will be approaching the doors. The town is in contact with the outside world because of the fame of Colonel Aureliano Buendía.

After the civil war , foreign imperialism comes to Macondo with devastating effects. The family elders are lost in their recollections, and the younger experiences are lost in the habits of wastage and loneliness. The last members of the family give in to the incestuous impulse and have a child with a pig's tail.

What other works has Gabriel García Marquez written?

Gabriel García Márquez is known for many other works besides One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Some of his notable works include:

• Love in the Time of Cholera : This novel explores the enduring love story of Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza, spanning decades and overcoming obstacles.
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold : A gripping tale that delves into the events leading to a murder in a small Colombian town.
• The General in His Labyrinth : This novel is an intimate portrayal of Simón Bolívar's final days, reflecting on his revolutionary leadership in Colombia.
• News of a Kidnapping : This book is a non-fiction work that delves into the kidnappings orchestrated by the Medellín Cartel during the 1990s, providing a gripping account of a dark period in Colombian history.
• The Autumn of the Patriarch : A political commentary that explores themes of power and dictatorship, offering profound insights into the complexities of governance and human nature.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is expected to be out on Netflix in 2024.

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Looking for a PDF of Biografía De Gabriel García Márquez? Look no further! This comprehensive biography delves into the life and works of the legendary Colombian author, providing valuable insights into his literary genius and personal struggles. Discover the inspirations behind García Márquez’s iconic novels such as “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “Love in the Time of Cholera”. Download the PDF to gain a deeper understanding of this Nobel Prize-winning writer and his impact on Latin American literature. Get your hands on Biografía De Gabriel García Márquez PDF today and explore the fascinating world of one of the greatest literary figures of our time.

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**Who is Gabriel García Márquez?**

Gabriel García Márquez, also known as Gabo, was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter, and journalist. He was born on March 6, 1927, in Aracataca, Colombia, and is best known for his novels such as “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “Love in the Time of Cholera.” García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982 for his contributions to the world of literature.

**Early Life and Career**

García Márquez grew up in a small town in Colombia and was raised by his grandparents. His grandmother’s storytelling had a profound influence on his writing style, which is characterized by magical realism and vivid imagery. García Márquez began his career as a journalist, working for various newspapers in Colombia and eventually moving to Mexico City, where he continued to write and publish his novels.

**Literary Works**

García Márquez’s most famous work is “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” a novel that tells the story of the Buendía family over seven generations in the fictional town of Macondo. The novel is considered a masterpiece of magical realism and has been translated into dozens of languages. Other notable works by García Márquez include “Love in the Time of Cholera,” “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” and “The Autumn of the Patriarch.”

García Márquez’s influence on the world of literature cannot be overstated. His novels have inspired countless writers and readers around the world, and his name is synonymous with the genre of magical realism. García Márquez’s work continues to be studied in universities and schools, and his impact on Latin American literature is undeniable.

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