Gabriel García Márquez

Colombian novelist and journalist

• Born: March 6, 1927
• Place of Birth: Aracataca, Colombia
• Died: April 17, 2014
• Place of Death: Mexico City, Mexico

Nobel laureate García Márquez was one of the best-known and most admired writers of Latin American fiction. His mythic accounts that reflect a vibrant blending of history, legends, and folktales were instrumental in bringing recognition to Latin American authors for their significant contribution to contemporary world literature.

Early Life

Gabriel García Márquez (gah-bree-EHL gahr-SEE-ah MAHR-kehz) was born in Aracataca, a small village in the Caribbean coastal region of Colombia. The eldest of twelve children of Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán and Gabriel Eligio García, García Márquez was reared by maternal grandparents. He grew up in a huge house with an extended family of aunts and great-aunts who, like his grandmother, were constant storytellers of local myth, superstition, and legend. His grandfather, a retired colonel, was the most important figure in García Márquez’s life. He filled the boy with tales of the civil wars of 1899–1903 and other past times, and young García Márquez himself developed a nostalgia for the way things used to be. Such childhood influences are reflected in García Márquez’s fiction, which abounds with old houses, ancient matriarchs, nostalgia, civil wars, colonels, and banana companies, and many of his works are set in Macondo, a fictional village with a strong resemblance to Aracataca.

In 1936, after García Márquez’s grandfather died, he was sent first to school in Barranquilla, then to the National Secondary School in Zipaquirá. After graduation in 1946, he enrolled in the National University of Colombia in Bogotá to study law. During this time, he also read poetry avidly and began to write short stories. In 1947, his first story, “La tercera resignación” (“The Third Resignation”), was published in the Bogotá newspaper El Espectador, and, during the next five years, he published many others there. Though most were immature and hard to understand, these stories presaged the surrealist quality of his later fiction.

In 1948, an assassination in Bogotá initiated a civil war in Colombia, known as La Violencia, that helped politicize García Márquez’s writing and provide source material for his later works. When this strife also forced the closing of the National University, García Márquez continued his studies at the University of Cartagena, where he took up journalism. In 1950, he left the university and became a columnist for El Heraldo in Barranquilla, where he lived in poverty, continued to write stories, and spent considerable time with journalists and writers in local cafés and bookstores. Through these friends, with whom he read and discussed European and North American fiction, García Márquez first became acquainted with the works of the authors who particularly influenced his writing: Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, and Joseph Conrad.

Life’s Work

García Márquez’s literary development occurred concurrently with his career as a journalist. In 1954, he returned to Bogotá, where he worked for El Espectador and wrote short stories in his spare time. One of them, “Un día después del sábado” (“One Day after Saturday”), won a competition sponsored by the Association of Artists and Writers of Bogotá. For a short time, García Márquez also attended local cell meetings of the Communist Party, and he said that he retained affection for these comrades, who he called the first colonizers of his political conscience.

In 1955, García Márquez’s first novel was published. La hojarasca (1955; Leaf Storm, and Other Stories, 1972) presents life in the fictional town of Macondo from 1900 to 1930 and is generally considered to be his most Faulknerian novel. García Márquez also wrote his work Isabel viendo llover en Macondo (1967; Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo, 1972) during this time as well as a true account of the shipwreck of a Colombian naval destroyer, which El Espectador published in fourteen installments without attribution. This story included material about illegal government activity and caused much controversy. Consequently, the editor of El Espectador thought it wise to send García Márquez abroad, where he worked as a foreign correspondent and also studied film writing and directing. When the Colombian government eventually closed down El Espectador because of the shipwreck story, García Márquez stayed on in Europe, traveling in some communist countries and then settling in Paris for several years of writing and literally starving in a garret.

In Paris he wrote two political novels: La mala hora (1962; In Evil Hour, 1979) received the Colombian Esso Literary Prize in 1961, and El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (1961; No One Writes to the Colonel, and Other Stories, 1968) was highly praised for its precise style and psychological insights. Although García Márquez’s fiction did not attract significant attention outside literary circles until the publication of his masterpiece, Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970), those who did know him recognized an extraordinary talent.

In 1958, García Márquez moved to Venezuela to work for the publication Momento in Caracas and, in that same year, married Mercedes Barcha. Over the next years he wrote most of the stories published as Los funerales de la Mamá Grande (1962). Until this point, except for Leaf Storm, García Márquez’s style had been Hemingway-like, appropriate for conveying the political turmoil that was then a characteristic theme in his work, but the title story in Los funerales de la Mamá Grande, which was allegorical and relied heavily on hyperbole, reflected a significant departure. The years from 1959 to 1965 marked a period of crisis for García Márquez. Caught between his former sparse style and a burgeoning mythical approach rich in language and imagery, he wrote no fiction and focused instead on journalism.

Like most Latin American intellectuals, García Márquez supported the Cuban Revolution. He went to Havana after Fidel Castro gained power in 1959 and then opened the Bogotá office of Castro’s Cuban news agency Prensa Latina. In 1961, he went to New York City with his wife and newborn son to establish Prensa Latina’s New York bureau but stayed only a short time. Leaving New York City on a Greyhound bus, they traveled through the South to see Faulkner country firsthand and then settled in Mexico, where the family lived until 1967. From 1961 to 1965, García Márquez worked as an editor, scriptwriter, and copywriter. In January 1965, he had an experience that ended his six-year hiatus from writing fiction and initiated a period of great productivity.

While driving from Mexico City to Acapulco, García Márquez had a vision of how he could, at last, tell the story of his childhood. Immediately turning around and returning home, he secluded himself from nearly everyone, including his wife and two sons, for the next one and a half years and wrote constantly, sometimes as much as fourteen hours a day. The result was One Hundred Years of Solitude, acclaimed as one of the major novels of the twentieth century. It became an immediate sensation in Spanish-speaking countries upon publication in 1967. Translated into more than thirty languages, One Hundred Years of Solitude won the Chianchiano Prize in Italy and was named the Best Foreign Book in France in 1969; in 1970, it was chosen as one of the twelve best books of the year by critics in the United States. The novel chronicles a mythical and adventurous history of six generations of the founding family of Macondo, in which García Márquez blurs the dichotomy between objective and subjective reality in a hilarious world of miracles. Its many levels have been interpreted as commentary on social, economic, and political changes in Colombia and Latin America as well as in microcosm a somewhat biblical allegory of the history of humanity.

After the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez was financially secure and able to devote himself full time to writing. He also traveled widely, speaking out on political and social issues. From 1967 to 1974, he and his family lived mostly in Barcelona, Spain, where he wrote fiction and contributed articles to such magazines as Mundo Nuévo and Casa del las Américas. In 1971, he received an honorary doctorate from Columbia University (New York), and in 1972 he won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in Venezuela and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

García Márquez then reestablished residence in Latin America and continued political activism supporting human rights issues and opposing dictatorship. In 1974, he founded the leftist periodical Alternativa in Bogotá, and throughout the 1970s he wrote political articles that were published in 1978 as Periodismo militante. García Márquez again went to Cuba, becoming friends with Castro, with whom he remained close. García Márquez novel El otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1975) and a collection of short stories entitled Todos los cuentos de Gabriel García Márquez appeared in 1975. He published another novel, Crónica de una muerte anunciada, in 1981 (Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1982).

In recognition of his international success as a storyteller of exceptional vigor, García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. His One Hundred Years of Solitude was singled out for particular praise, and his success as a journalist and author of nonfiction articles also was noted. In 1983, he resumed work on the novel that he had started before receiving the Nobel Prize, El amor en los tiempos del cólera (1985; Love in the Time of Cholera, 1988), a best-selling work of magical realism that highlights themes of love and old age and emphasizes the value of human dignity and happiness. He also continued to write articles expressing his leftist political views and, in 1986, published La aventura de Miguel Littin, clandestino en Chile (Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littin, 1987), an account of the secret return of exiled film director Miguel Littin to his native Chile.

García Márquez published his next novel in 1989, after three years of preliminary research and two years of writing. El general en su labertino (The General in His Labyrinth, 1990) chronicles the last months in the life of Simón Bolívar, who is generally considered to be Latin America’s greatest hero. The novel challenges Bolívar’s image, however, and portrays him as a man of considerable imperfection. It has sparked great controversy among critics, historians, academics, and the reading public in Latin America, and the controversy has been especially strong in Colombia. Many have criticized García Márquez for insufficient research, sensationalism, and unpatriotic conduct. Others praise his masterful blend of facts and imagination and emphasize that the work should be read as a novel, not as history. García Márquez himself said, however, that he was certain that the novel presents Bolívar as he really was. The General in His Labyrinth became an immediate best seller upon publication in the Spanish-speaking world.

In 1992, García Márquez published Doce cuentos peregrinos (Strange Pilgrims: Twelve Stories, 1993). In 1994, he published Del amor y otros demonios (Of Love and Other Demons, 1995), a novella set in eighteenth-century Cartagena, a center for the Spanish slave trade. He also continued to focus on nonfiction during this time, and in 1995 he established the Fundación Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano (Foundation for a New Ibero-American Journalism) to help revitalize the region. Based in Cartagena, the foundation began to offer, among other things, traveling workshops to improve the creativity and ethics of professional journalists. Over the years, García Márquez was actively involved with the foundation, leading seminars when possible.

In 1996, García Márquez published Noticia de un secuestro (News of a Kidnapping, 1997), reconstructing political events in Colombia in 1990, when ten prominent people, mostly journalists, were taken hostage by Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medellín drug cartel, in an attempt to prevent his extradition to the United States. Written in a straightforward style with precise detail, this international best seller is based on extensive interviews with the survivors as well as those who negotiated for their release.

In the late 1990s, García Márquez became majority owner of Cambio, at the time a struggling weekly news magazine in Bogotá. In the spring of 1999, García Márquez withdrew from public life, though his illness, lymphatic cancer, was not generally known for months. At one point, a false rumor of his death spread rapidly over the Internet. García Márquez continued to receive medical treatment for the cancer.

In 2002, García Márquez published Vivir para contarla (Living to Tell the Tale, 2003), the first installment of a three-volume memoir covering the years to 1955. It immediately sold out in Latin America and became the best-selling book of all time in the Spanish-speaking world. Seeds of García Márquez’s storytelling may be found in the memoir, but readers hoping to pin things down will most likely be disappointed, for in characteristic fashion, magic and actuality cannot be separated into discrete strands even here. In 2004, García Márquez published his first work of fiction in years, Memoria de mis putas tristes (Memories of My Melancholy Whores, 2005). That same year, One Hundred Years of Solitude was chosen as a book-club selection by the widely popular American television talk-show host Oprah Winfrey.

The year 2007 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of García Márquez’s Nobel Prize, the fortieth publication anniversary of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and García Márquez’s eightieth birthday. In Spain on March 6, politicians, writers, and actors from many Spanish-speaking countries held a twenty-hour reading from One Hundred Years of Solitude, which has sold more than 10 million copies. In Aracataca, eighty cannon volleys were fired, and yellow paper butterflies filled public spaces. Later in March, after an absence of more than twenty years, García Márquez visited Aracataca with his wife, arriving by train, touring in a horse-drawn carriage, signing autographs, and posing for photographs but making no official speeches. Thousands of people turned out to see Gabo, as he was affectionately known.

García Márquez’s reputation is drawn from his fiction; however, he was also a longtime supporter of Latin American film. In 1980, he received an Ariel award (roughly the Mexican equivalent of an Academy Award) for scriptwriting, and he served as first president of the Foundation for New Latin American Film in Havana, Cuba, at its inception in 1985. García Márquez intermittently collaborated with directors to bring his works to the screen and to the stage. In such projects as well as in his fiction, García Márquez deals with Latin America’s struggle to find its own identity. The film version of Love in the Time of Cholera was released in 2007. In 2010 García Márquez published a collection of speeches, "Yo no vengo a decir un discurso" ("I didn't come to give a speech") in Spain and Latin America. In 2012 reports surfaced that García Márquez was suffering from dementia and was no longer writing.

In April 2014, García Márquez was hospitalized and treated for a lung infection, dehydration, and pneumonia. His health remained poor following his release from the hospital, and he died in his home in Mexico City on April 17, 2014.

In March 2024, a final novel manuscript of García Márquez’s, Until August, was published by Random House. His sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha, decided to publish the book against their father’s final wishes, as he had worked on it for years but never finished it due to his declining memory. In the preface, the sons justified their decision by expressing their desire for García Márquez's readers to experience this final piece from their father, despite his initial reservations about its quality before his death. Until August was thus controversial, though eagerly anticipated, and received mixed reviews from critics.

Significance

Latin American fiction experienced a flowering in the 1960s and became recognized as a powerful force in contemporary literature. With Julio Cortázar, Ernesto Sábato, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Carlos Fuentes, García Márquez is acknowledged as one of the most influential writers of what is often referred to as the “Latin American fiction boom” period. His style, which reflects a more expanded vision of Latin American reality than did the novels of the previous generation, has been termed by some critics as “magical realism”: the bold interweaving of imagination and realism that is at once both fantasy and social commentary. García Márquez explained that the imagination is an instrument for producing reality a reality that is not “limited to the price of tomatoes and eggs” and cited daily life in Latin America as proof that “reality is full of the most extraordinary things.”

García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude has been called one of the greatest novels of the Hispanic tradition since Don Quixote. García Márquez characteristically captures both the essence of Hispanic culture and the universality of human experience in his work, and he was especially instrumental in the rising popularity of Latin American literature in the English-speaking world. In addition to his literary achievements, García Márquez was also recognized as a prominent journalist in the struggle for political self-determinism and social justice in Latin American countries. He considered himself most of all to be a storyteller, not an intellectual or even a writer. “I’m a storyteller,” he told an interviewer. “It doesn’t matter to me whether the stories are written, shown on a screen, over television or passed from mouth to mouth. The important thing is that they be told.” The mythical fiction of García Márquez introduced the art of storytelling within the context of the modern novel, and the response of both popular and scholarly audiences indicates that the story of Latin America is indeed being heard.

Bibliography

Ahmad, Mustanir, Ayaz Afsar, and Sobia Masood. "Magical Realism as Social Protest in Gabriel García Márquez's Of Love and Other Demons." Asian Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 25, no. 3, 2012, pp. 47–62. Academic Search Complete. Accessed 30 Dec. 2013.

Bell-Villada, Gene H., ed. Conversations with Gabriel García Márquez. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2006.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Gabriel García Márquez. New York: Chelsea, 2006.

Fau, Margaret Eustella, and Nelly Sfeir de Gonzalez, comps. Bibliographic Guide to Gabriel García Márquez, 1979–1985. Westport: Greenwood, 1986.

García Márquez, Gabriel. The Fragrance of the Guava: Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza in Conversation with Gabriel García Márquez. Trans. Ann Wright. Verso, 1983.

García Márquez, Gabriel. "Why Allende Had to Die." New Statesman, 29 Mar. 2013, pp. 44–49. Academic Search Complete. Accessed 30 Dec. 2013.

Gonzalez, Nelly Sfeir de, comp. Bibliographic Guide to Gabriel García Márquez, 1986–1992. Westport: Greenwood, 1994.

Gonzalez, Nelly Sfeir de, comp. Bibliographic Guide to Gabriel García Márquez, 1992–2002. Westport: Praeger, 2003.

Kandell, Jonathan. "Gabriel García Márquez, Conjurer of Literary Magic, Dies at 87." New York Times. New York Times, 18 Apr. 2014. Web. 18 Apr. 2014.

McMurray, George R., comp. Critical Essays on Gabriel García Márquez. Boston: Hall, 1987.

Pelayo, Rubén. Gabriel García Márquez: A Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood, 2001.

Plimpton, George, ed. Latin American Writers at Work. New York: Modern Lib., 2003.

Roig-Franzia, Manuel. “Gabriel García Márquez’s Sons Publish the Novel He Wanted Destroyed.” The Washington Post, 13 Mar. 2024, www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/03/13/until-august-gabriel-garcia-marquez-review/. Accessed 3 Apr. 2024.

Stavans, Ilan. Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years. New York: Palgrave, 2010.

Swanson, Philip. The Cambridge Companion to Gabriel García Márquez. New York: Cambridge UP, 2010.

White, Judith. "In Search of García Márquez." Meanjin, vol. 71, no. 4, 2012, pp. 148–54. Academic Search Complete. Accessed 30 Dec. 2013.

Williams, Raymond L. Gabriel García Márquez. Boston: Twayne, 1984.