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Gabriel García Márquez
García Márquez signing a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude in Havana, Cuba.
Born	March 6, 1927 (1927-03-06) (age 80) Aracataca, Magdalena, Colombia
Occupation	novelist, short-story writer, and journalist.
Nationality	Colombia
Genres	Magical Realism
Influences	G. K. Chesterton, Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Faulkner, Günter Grass, Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, Ernest Hemingway, Juan Rulfo, Virginia Woolf
Influenced	Salman Rushdie
Signature

Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez, also known as Gabo (born March 6, 1927^[1] in Aracataca, department of Magdalena) is a Nobel Prize-winning Colombian novelist, short-story writer, and journalist.

García Márquez is one of Latin America's most recognized writers. Although he has written many acclaimed non-fiction and short stories, he is most well-known for his novels, such as Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude, published 1967) and El amor en los tiempos del cólera (Love in the Time of Cholera, published 1985). He has achieved both significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for introducing magical realism to the literary world. He is thus considered one of the greatest authors of the 20th century.

García Márquez is renown for his radical political views. He has expressed support for revolutionary movements in Latin America, and has even been critical of politics in his native Colombia. He has facilitated negotiations between revolutionary and government groups in Latin America.

García Márquez has a house in Cartagena, Colombia, and has lived in both Mexico and Europe. He currently spends the majority of his time in Mexico City.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Biography

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Gabriel García Márquez was born on 6 March 1927 in the town of Aracataca, Magdalena. His parents Gabriel Eligio García and Luisa Santiaga Márquez left him to be brought up by his grandparents Nicolás Márquez and Tranquilina Iguarán. The writer often gave credit to his grandmother for her influence and inspiration on his story telling. After starting his early education at a boarding school in Barranquilla, García Márquez at the age of 16 was awarded a scholarship to a secondary school for gifted students called the Liceo Nacional in Zipaquirá which he attended until he was 18. He then moved 30 miles south to Bogotá where he studied law and journalism at the National University of Colombia.

The most important relatives of García Márquez were undoubtedly his maternal grandfather and grandmother. His grandfather was Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía, a Liberal veteran of the Thousand Days War. He lived in a banana town by the Caribbean called Aracataca, which he was instrumental in founding. The Colonel was considered a hero to the costeños (the people who live along the Caribbean coast), for among other things, refusing to stay silent about the banana massacres, delivering a searing denunciation of the murders to Congress in 1929. A very complex and interesting man, the Colonel was also an excellent storyteller who had led quite an intriguing life — when he was younger he shot and killed a man in a duel, and it is said that he had fathered over sixteen children. He would speak of his wartime exploits as if they were "almost pleasant experiences — sort of youthful adventures with guns." The old Colonel taught the young Gabriel lessons from the dictionary, took him to the circus each year, and was the first one who introduced his grandson to ice — a miracle to be found at the United Fruit Company store. He also told his young grandson that there was no greater burden than to have killed a man, a lesson that García Márquez would later put into the mouths of his characters.

His grandmother was Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, and would be no less an influence on the young García Márquez than her husband. She was impressively filled with superstitions and folk beliefs, as were her numerous sisters, and they filled the house with stories of ghosts and premonitions, omens and portents -- all of which were studiously ignored by her husband, who once said to young Gabriel, "Don't listen to that. Those are women's beliefs." And yet listen he did, for his grandmother had a unique way of telling stories. No matter how fantastic or improbable her statements, she always delivered them as if they were the irrefutable truth. It was a deadpan style that, some thirty years later, her grandson would adopt for his greatest novel.

García Márquez's parents were more or less strangers to him for the first few years of his life. His mother, Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán, was one of two children born to the Colonel and his wife. A spirited girl, she unfortunately fell in love with a man named Gabriel Eligio García. "Unfortunately," for García was something of an anathema to her parents. For one thing, he was a Conservative as well as an "hojarasca", a derogatory term applied to the recent residents of the town drawn by the banana trade. (La hojarasca means "dead leaf," as in something that descends in useless flurries and is best swept away.) García also had a reputation as a philanderer, the father of four illegitimate children. He was not exactly the man the Colonel had envisioned winning the heart of his daughter — and yet he did, wooing her with violin serenades, love poems, countless letters — and even telegraph messages. They tried all they could to get rid of the man, but he kept coming back, and it was obvious that their daughter was committed to him. Finally they surrendered to his romantic tenacity, and the Colonel gave her hand in marriage to the former medical student. In order to ease relations, the newlyweds settled in the Colonel's old home town of Riohacha. (The tragicomic story of their courtship would later be adapted and recast as Love in the Time of Cholera.)

[edit] Family

García Márquez married Mercedes Barcha in 1958. They have two sons. He is the father of television and film director Rodrigo Garcia.

[edit] Illness

In 1999, García Márquez was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. This event incited García Márquez to start writing his memoirs. In 2000, his impending death was incorrectly reported by Peruvian daily newspaper La República. The next day other newspapers republished his alleged farewell poem, "La Marioneta" but shortly afterwards García Márquez denied being the author of the poem which was determined to be the work of a Mexican ventriloquist.^[2][3]

[edit] Career

[edit] Journalism

García Márquez started his career as a reporter and editor for regional newspapers — El Heraldo in Barranquilla and El Universal in Cartagena. It was during this time that he became an active member of the informal group of writers and journalists known as the Barranquilla Group, an association that provided great motivation and inspiration for his literary career. García Márquez then worked as a foreign correspondent in Caracas, Rome, Paris, Barcelona, India, and New York City.

[edit] Literature

García Márquez's first major work was The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (Relato de un náufrago), which he wrote as a newspaper series in 1955. The book told the true story of a shipwreck by exposing the fact that the existence of contraband aboard a Colombian Navy vessel had contributed to the tragedy due to overweight. This resulted in public controversy, as it discredited the official account of the events, which had blamed a storm for the shipwreck and glorified the surviving sailor. This led to the beginning of his foreign correspondence, as García Márquez became a sort of persona non grata to the government of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. The series was later published in 1970 and taken by many to have been written as a novel.

Several of his works have been classified as both fiction and non-fiction, notably Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Crónica de una muerte anunciada) (1981), which tells the tale of a revenge killing recorded in the newspapers, and Love in the Time of Cholera (El amor en los tiempos del cólera) (1985), which is loosely based on the story of his parents' courtship. Many of his works, including those two, take place in the "García Márquez universe," in which characters, places, and events reappear from book to book. The works of Gabriel García Márquez often cross genres and most integrate at least a few elements of magical realism. Furthermore, many of his novels and short stories integrate actual history as well as complete fabrication, making his genres sometimes difficult to pin down.

[edit] His Masterpiece: One Hundred Years of Solitude

His most commercially successful novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad) (1967; English translation by Gregory Rabassa 1970), has sold more than 36 million copies worldwide. It chronicles several generations of the Buendía family who live in a fictional South American village called Macondo. García Márquez won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1972 for One Hundred Years of Solitude. William Kennedy has called it "the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race"^[4]

[edit] Nobel Prize

In 1982 he received the 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".^[5][6]

[edit] Recent Work

In 2002, he published the memoir Vivir para contarla, the first of a projected three-volume autobiography. The book was a bestseller in the Spanish-speaking world. Edith Grossman's English translation, Living to Tell the Tale, was published in November 2003 and has become another bestseller. On September 10, 2004, the Bogotá daily El Tiempo announced a new novel, Memoria de mis putas tristes (Memories of My Melancholy Whores), a love story that follows the romance of a 90-year old man and a drugged, pubescent concubine, was published the following October with a first print run of one million copies.

[edit] Film

A number of films have been made of García Márquez's work (such as Ruy Guerra's Eréndira), but few have been critical or popular successes. Most recently, British director Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral) has completed production in Cartagena, Colombia, of a film based on García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, with the screenplay written by Ronald Harwood (The Pianist). The film's cast includes Spaniard Javier Bardem and Italian Giovanna Mezzogiorno, as well as Colombian actress Catalina Sandino. Colombian-born U.S. actor John Leguizamo and Benjamin Bratt, of Peruvian descent, also star in the film. The film was released in the U.S. on November 16, 2007.

In 1987, the Director Francesco Rosi directed the movie Cronaca di una morte annunciata ("Cronica de una Muerte Anunciada" Chronicle of a Death Foretold). The cast include Rupert Everett , Ornella Muti, Gian Maria Volontè, Lucia Bosé, Anthony Delon, Alain Cuny , Sergi Mateu, Silverio Blasi, Carlos Miranda, Rogerio Miranda, Vicky Hernández, Leonor González, Caroline Lang, Carolina Rosi.

[edit] Political views

Billboard of Gabriel García Márquez in Aracataca. It reads: "I feel like an American from whatever country, but I have never renounced the nostalgia of my homeland: Aracataca, to which I returned one day and discovered that between the reality and the nostalgia was the primary material for my work". —Gabriel García Márquez

García Márquez is noted for his friendship with former Cuban president Fidel Castro and has previously expressed sympathy for some Latin American revolutionary groups, especially during the 1960s and 1970s. He has also been critical of the political situation in Colombia.

In different circumstances, García Márquez has occasionally acted as a low profile facilitator in several negotiations between the Colombian government and the guerrillas, including the former 19th of April Movement and the current FARC and ELN organizations. ^[7][8]

This section does not cite any references or sources. (February 2008) Please improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

On January 26, 2006, García Márquez joined other internationally renowned figures such as Mario Benedetti, Ernesto Sábato, Thiago de Mello, Eduardo Galeano, Carlos Monsiváis, Pablo Armando Fernández, Jorge Enrique Adoum, Pablo Milanés, Luis Rafael Sánchez, Mayra Montero and Ana Lydia Vega, in supporting sovereignty for Puerto Rico and joining the Latin American and Caribbean Congress for the Independence of Puerto Rico, which approved a resolution favoring the island-nation's right to assert its independence, as ratified unanimously by political parties hailing from 22 countries in November 2006; García Márquez's push for the recognition of Puerto Rico's independence was obtained at the behest of the Puerto Rican Independence Party. His pledge for support to the Puerto Rican Independence Movement was part of a wider effort that emerged from the Latin American and Caribbean Congress in Solidarity with Puerto Rico’s Independence.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Novels

• In Evil Hour 1962
• One Hundred Years of Solitude 1967
• The Autumn of the Patriarch 1975
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold 1981
• Love in the Time of Cholera 1985
• The General in His Labyrinth 1989
• Of Love and Other Demons 1994
• Memories of My Melancholy Whores 2004

[edit] Short Story Collections

• No One Writes to the Colonel 1968
• Leaf Storm 1972
• Innocent Erendira 1978
• Strange Pilgrims 1992
• The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World

[edit] Non-fiction

• The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor 1955
• The Fragrance of Guava 1982
• Clandestine in Chile 1987
• News of a Kidnapping 1996
• A Country for Children 1998
• Living to Tell the Tale 2002

[edit] See also

• Latin American Boom
• Magical Realism
• The Dictator Novel
• McOndo

[edit] References

Fernández Leal Augusto, La vida de Máquez

[edit] Further reading

• Bhalla, Alok (1987). Garcia Marquez and Latin America. 
• Bell, Michael (1993). Gabriel García Márquez: Solitude and Solidarity. 
• Bloom, Harold (2007). Gabriel García Márquez (Modern Critical Views). 
• Bloom, Harold (2006). Gabriel García Márquez (Bloom's BioCritiques). 
• Bloom, Harold (2006). One Hundred Years of Solitude (Modern Critical Interpretations). 
• Bloom, Harold (2005). Love in the time of cholera (Modern Critical Interpretations). 
• Darraj, Susan (2006). Gabriel García Márquez(The great Hispanic heritage). 
• Fahy, Thomas (2003). Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the time of cholera : a reader's guide. 
• Fiddian, Robin W. (1995). García Márquez. 
• Fuentes, Carlos (1987). Gabriel García Márquez and the Invention of America. 
• Janes, Regina (1981). Gabriel García Márquez: Revolutions in Wonderland. 
• McGuirk, Bernard (1987). Gabriel García Márquez: New Readings. 
• McMurray, George R. (1977). Gabriel García Márquez. 
• McMurray, George R. (1987). Critical essays on Gabriel García Márquez. 
• McMurray, George R. (1987). Gabriel García Márquez: Life, Work, and Criticism. 
• McNerney, Kathleen (1989). Understanding Gabriel García Márquez. 
• Mellen, Joan (2000). Gabriel Garcia Márquez. 
• Miller, Yvette E. (1985). Gabriel Garcia Marquez. 
• Oberhelman, Harley D. (1991). Gabriel García Márquez: A Study of the Short Fiction. 
• Ortega, Julio (1988). Gabriel García Márquez and the Powers of Fiction. 
• Oyarzún, Kemy (1984). Essays on Gabriel García Márquez. 
• Penuel, Arnold M. (1994). Intertextuality in García Márquez. 
• Pelayo, Rubén (2001). Gabriel García Márquez: A Critical Companion. 
• Shaw, Bradley A. (1986). Critical Perspectives on Gabriel García Márquez. 
• Vergara, Isabel (1998). Haunting demons : critical essays on the works of Gabriel García Márquez. 
• Villada, Gene (2002). Gabriel García Márquez's One hundred years of solitude : a casebook. 
• Williams, Raymond L. (1984). Gabriel García Márquez (Twayne's World Authors Series). 

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Gabriel García Márquez

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Gabriel García Márquez

• Ghostwriting Gabo [Memoir Piece by David Unger at Guernica Magazine]
• García Márquez, Gabriel at the Open Directory Project
• Garcia Marquez at The Modern Word
• Oprah makes latest book club pick
• Documentary 52': Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The world according Garcia Marquez [in spanish by Piedad Bonnet - Icono Editorial]

v • d • e Works by Gabriel García Márquez
Magic Realism
Novels:	In Evil Hour • One Hundred Years of Solitude • The Autumn of the Patriarch • Chronicle of a Death Foretold • Love in the Time of Cholera • The General in His Labyrinth • Of Love and Other Demons • Memories of My Melancholy Whores
Short stories:	"Leaf Storm" • "No One Writes to the Colonel" • "Big Mama's Funeral" • "The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother" • "Strange Pilgrims" • "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" • "For The Sake of A Country Within Reach Of The Children"
Non-fiction:	The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor • Clandestine in Chile:The Adventures of Miguel Littin • News of a Kidnapping • Living to Tell the Tale