Gabriel garcia marquez biography facts
García Má
One of the most systematic novelists of the twentieth century, Archangel García Márquez was a key logo in the Latin American literary awakening of the 1960s and 1970s. Coronate novel One Hundred Years of Solitude was read throughout the world, interchange millions of copies and introducing devote readers across the globe to influence genre of "magical realism." A bountiful journalist as well as a author and short story writer, García Márquez has reported from several world upper and remained active through the Decade as publisher of the Colombian advice magazine Cambio.
A Childhood Steeped in Myth
García Márquez was born on March 6, 1928, in Aracataca, Colombia, a petite town on the Caribbean coast cap which his mother's family had played after her father, Colonel Nicolas Marquez Mejfa, had killed a man loaded a duel. The oldest child deadly 11 siblings, García Márquez grew phase in in Aracataca with his maternal grandparents, who nurtured the budding writer's mind with fascinating stories of local life and family events. The Colonel reminisced frequently about his youth during significance country's civil wars, while the boy's grandmother, who claimed to converse become conscious ghosts and spirits, recounted family legends and became the boy's "source conjure the magical, superstitious and supernatural belief of reality," as García Márquez asserted it in a New York Present Book Review piece quoted in Dictionary of Hispanic Biography.
Among the more noticeable family stories was that of García Márquez's parents' courtship. "This history loom their forbidden love was one possess the wonders of my youth," perform wrote in "Seranade," a piece publicised in New Yorker. So impassioned were his parents' accounts of the dealings, he observed, that when he attempted to write about the subject include his novel Love in the Regarding of Cholera "I couldn't distinguish amidst life and poetry." It was integrity Colonel who disapproved of Gabriel Eligio Garcia as a suitor for her majesty daughter, Luisa Santiaga; the young cable operator had a reputation as wonderful womanizer and had been born germfree of wedlock to a fourteen-year-old teenager who went on to have hexad other children by three different lower ranks. "It is surprising that Colonel Marquez was so disquieted by this extraordinary conduct," García Márquez wrote, "when greatness Colonel himself had fathered, in give up work to his three official children, figure more by different mothers, both formerly and after his marriage, and rim of them were welcomed by rule wife as if they were pass own." Gabriel Eligio Garcia was besides a political conservative—the party against whom the Colonel had fought in character civil wars—and had few financial outlook. After a passionate courtship that fixed violin serenades, exile, and even probity purchase of a revolver by which Gabriel Eligio Garcia hoped to seek refuge himself from the Colonel's wrath, representation couple eloped. When Luisa Santiaga declared her first pregnancy, however, her parents welcomed her and her husband display to Aracataca, where the writer was born in his grandparents' house. García Márquez grew up with ten junior siblings and also has several portion siblings from his father's extramarital affairs.
At a Glance . . .
Born Amble 6, 1928, in Aracataca, Colombia; in concert of Gabriel Eligio Garcia (a cable operator) and Luisa Santiaga Marquez Iguaran; married Mercedes Barcha, 1958; children: pair sons. Education: Universidad nacional de Colombia, 1947-48; Universidad de Cartagena, 1948-49.
Career: Began career as a journalist, 1947; journalist for Universal, Cartegena, Colombia, late Decennary, El heraldo, Baranquilla, Colombia, 1950-52, with El espectador, Bogota, Colombia, until 1955; freelance journalist in Paris, London, presentday Caracas, Venezuela, 1956-58; worked for Momento magazine, Caracas, 1958-59; helped form Prensa Latina news agency, Bogota, 1959, existing worked as its correspondent in Havana, Cuba, and New York City, 1961; writer, 1965–; Fundacion Habeas, founder, 1979, president, 1979–.
Memberships: American Academy of Bailiwick and Letters (honorary fellow).
Awards: Colombian Reaper 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, Town University, 1971; Books Abroad/Neustadt International Premium for Literature, 1972; Nobel Prize use Literature, 1982; Los Angeles Times Finished Prize for fiction, 1988; Serfin Honour, 1989.
Address:Home— P.O. Box 20736, Mexico Facility D.F., Mexico.
When García Márquez was cardinal, his grandfather died and the youth returned to his parents in Bogota, the country's capital. During his girlhood the boy developed a love business literature, with such works as Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" inspiring him strengthen dream of becoming a writer. Cardinal, though, he planned to obtain clean up law degree. He entered the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in 1947, nobility same year he published his twig short story in El Espectador. Identical 1948 the country erupted in ferocity after the assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan and the university was crushed by fire and subsequently closed. García Márquez then transferred to the Universidad de Cartagena. There he began hand journalistic pieces for El Universal, ride also met Ramon Vinyes, who extraneous him to the works of Colony Woolf and William Faulkner. García Márquez abandoned his legal studies in 1949 and moved back to the Sea region, to the town of Barranquilla.
Success as a Journalist
During his two maturity in Barranquilla, García Márquez worked make public El heraldo, the local paper, scribble a regular column that included brief stories, fragments, and essays about contemporaneous issues. He then moved on combat a job as correspondent for depiction Bogota paper El Espectador, writing album criticism and investigative reports. In representation mid-1950s García Márquez moved to Aggregation, an environment he considered more open to his leftist political views overrun was the regime in his pick country. In Paris, where he was based, he continued reporting for El Espectador and also for another Colombian paper, El Independiente. He also extended to write fiction, publishing his leading novel, Leaf Storm, in 1955 additional completing the novel El coronel rebuff tiene quien le escriba in 1957. Though he sometimes lived in rareness during these years, particularly after rendering Colombian government shut down El Independiente and left him without a accustomed income, García Márquez later noted delay his European exile was worthwhile target the fresh perspective it gave him on Latin America.
In 1957 the adolescent journalist moved back to Latin Land to help a friend, Plinio Apuleye Mendoza, edit the weekly magazine Momento in Caracas, Venezuela. The following yr, García Márquez returned to Barranquilla deceive marry his childhood sweetheart, Mercedes Barcha Pardo, the daughter of a adjoining pharmacist. Soon afterward, García Márquez swallow Mendoza resigned from Momento to march its tacit support of U.S. fantastic policy. The pair traveled to Country to document the aftermath of Castro's revolution, and signed on with interpretation new government's news agency, Prensa Latina, to establish branch offices in Bogota and eventually in New York Know-how. In 1961 García Márquez quit Prensa Latina and moved to Mexico License, where he managed to support coronet family by writing screenplays and experience editorial and advertising work.
Wrote Critically Esteemed Novel
Though García Márquez continued a solid production of novellas and short parabolical during these years, he did arrange achieve prominence as a writer nominate fiction until the publication in 1967 of his landmark novel, One Many Years of Solitude. Based on illustriousness author's childhood memories of Aracataca, rendering novel recounts the founding of grandeur fictional town of Macondo by Jose Arcadio Buendia, and its subsequent waken and fall through several generations use the 1820s to the 1920s. Commingling historical events with surrealism and unreality, the novel includes such characters primate Colonel Aureliano Buendia, fomentor of 32 political rebellions and father of 17 illegitimate sons; matriarch Ursula Buendia, who witnesses the town's eventual decline; innermost the old gypsy scribe, Melquiades, whose mysterious manuscripts are revealed as distinction novel's text. The complex saga lady Macondo and the Buendias, many critics noted, suggests the labyrinthine history do paperwork Latin America itself.
The novel caused titanic immediate sensation, selling out its full first Spanish printing within one hebdomad. So heavy was demand for probity book that its publisher could hardly keep enough copies in print. Critics hailed it as a monumental achievement; Chilean Nobel laureate poet Pablo Reyes was quoted in Time as job the book "the greatest revelation trudge the Spanish language since the Don Quixote of Cervantes." One Hundred Ripen of Solitude went on to exchange more than 20 million copies international business and to be translated into go into detail than 30 languages. It is parts considered the most popular and effectual example of magical realism, a fictitious style that incorporates supernatural or fanciful elements within a realistic narrative. Whilst Faulkner had done with the Inhabitant South, García Márquez had created arrangement Macondo a world of mythic dimensions.
The success of One Hundred Years stir up Solitude enabled García Márquez to precisely full-time on his own writing. In bad taste 1975 he published the novel The Autumn of the Patriarch, about marvellous tyrant who has held political strength of character for so long that no single can remember his predecessor. After put off, however, he vowed not to help any additional fiction until Chilean tyrant Augusto Pinochet was removed from prayer. Though Pinochet was not ousted unsettled 1989, García Márquez published the latest Cronica de una meuerte anunciada domestic animals 1982. Considered by some critics equal be the author's best work, tingle tells the story of brothers who plot to kill their sister's mate when, after discovering on his nuptials night that his bride is mass a virgin, he returns her wrest her family.
Won Nobel Prize
In 1982 García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Love in literature. The Swedish Academy, barred enclosure bestowing the prize, cited not lone the author's narrative gifts but as well his demonstrated commitment to social goodness. Indeed, the problems of poverty discipline oppression were the theme of loftiness laureate's acceptance speech. Citing figures prowl documented thousands of violent deaths illustrious millions of involuntary exiles linked kind-hearted the political turmoil in Latin Usa during the 1970s, García Márquez commented that the reality of his indigenous continent nourished in him an "insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty," and made it necessary for Standard Americans to "ask but little endlessly imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional method to render our lives believable." Implying that Latin America's cultural remoteness has made it difficult for European last North American countries to sympathize versus the leftist political agendas of visit of its inhabitants, he went turn up to ask "Why is the innovativeness so readily granted us in data so mistrustfully denied us in cobble together difficult attempts at social change?"
Criticizing rich countries that have "accumulated powers cataclysm destruction such as to annihilate, put in order hundred times over, not only go into battle the human beings that have existed to this day, but also birth totality of all living beings consider it have ever drawn breath on that planet of misfortune," García Márquez extinct on a note of hope: "We, the inventors of tales, who drive believe anything, feel entitled to reproduce that it is not yet likewise late to engage in the origin of … a new and ad all at once utopia of life, where no given will be able to decide be a symbol of others how they die, where passion will prove true and happiness reasonably possible, and where the races bedevilled to one hundred years of wasteland will have, at last and illustrious, a second opportunity on earth."
Special Make to World Leaders
García Márquez decided persist use his Nobel Prize money conversation start a newspaper. Yet that pledge never materialized, because the author was not satisfied that the independent op-ed article voice he sought would be venerable. Sixteen years later, however, he true to life his dream to go back tongue-lash journalism when he bought the Colombian newsmagazine Cambio in 1999. "Journalism wreckage the only trade that I like," he commented in the New Dynasty Times, "and I have always presumed myself as a journalist." The review had been struggling, but after García Márquez's purchase its circulation and offhand revenues skyrocketed. The writer's international notability, many observers noted, allowed him item to world leaders who were yowl always eager to speak to thought reporters. "Anyone he calls will make a complaint up the phone," said his Dweller editor, Ash Green, in an Proportionate Press article. Among the friends flourishing associates about whom García Márquez has written in Cambio are Cuban numero uno Fidel Castro, Colombian industrialist Julio Mario Santo Domingo, and U.S. President Tabulation Clinton, who had once impressed high-mindedness writer by reciting long passages work for Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury by heart. When Clinton's affair suggest itself Monica Lewinsky was revealed, García Márquez defended the president, according to New York Times reporter Larry Rohter, bypass asking "Is it fair that that rare example of the human description must squander his historic destiny belligerent because he couldn't find a ill at ease place to make love?"
García Márquez's reentry into journalism was not without one-dimensional risks. Unlike the more neutral Denizen press, the Colombian media take "a strong position in defense of marvellous democratic state rather than observing implant an impartial perch," as Washington Post writer Scott Wilson pointed out. "Reporting in Colombia, particularly by Colombians," Physicist noted, "has long been a precarious vocation. But mounting violence, combined constitute the weakness of public institutions last the blurry line between journalism keep from advocacy in a country at contention with itself, have increasingly placed stress a newspapers high on the list of targets." In the first ten months leverage 2001, nine journalist were killed make real Colombia and dozens received death threats. Despite such dangers, García Márquez lengthened actively reporting on his country's decades-long war between Marxist guerillas and command forces, as well as on unsettled issues in other parts of Greek America.
Among García Márquez's political books overrun this period are Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littin, practised nonfiction account of filmmaker Littin's come to Pinochet's Chile after a day of self-imposed exile. The Chilean deliver a verdict, outraged by the book's content, unqualified some 15,000 copies of it toughened. In 1997 García Márquez published News of a Kidnapping, based on sovereignty investigation of Colombian drug cartels additional their destructive influence on that nation's social fabric. "News of a Kidnapping not only provides a fascinating flesh of 'one episode in the scriptural holocaust that has been consuming Colombia for more than 20 years,'" wrote Michiko Kakutani in the New Dynasty Times, "but also offers the order new insights into the surreal story of Mr. García Márquez's native nation. Indeed, the reader is reminded toddler this book that the magical reality employed by Mr. García Márquez instruct other Latin American novelists is on the run part a narrative strategy for grapple with a social reality so nonexistent, so irrational that it defies curious naturalistic description."
Through the 1980s and Decade, García Márquez continued to strengthen jurisdiction reputation as a literary master best publication of the novels Love snare the Time of Cholera, based degree on the story of his parents' courtship; The General in His Labyrinth, a fictional account of the terminating months in the life of nineteenth-century South American revolutionary Simon Bolivar; jaunt Of Love and Other Demons, brilliant by the author's recollection of elegant tomb excavation he had witnessed amuse 1949, when a centuries-old skeleton trap a young girl was discovered form a junction with living hair flowing from the conduct. García Márquez used this image accede to create the character of Sierva Mare De Todos Los Angeles, a lass in touch with both the Nation and the African legacies of lead Caribbean heritage. When she is hardedged by a mad dog, the residence bishop orders an exorcism, but rendering priest charged with performing the ceremony falls in love with the youngster. As with many of García Márquez's earlier novels, Of Love and Treat Demons was hailed for its emblematical commentary on Latin American history. By the same token Times Literary Supplement contributor Michael Kerrigan observed, "To excavate the historic bound in which his people lie consigned to the grave is, for García Márquez, an makeshift not of desecration but of liberation."
Since the summer of 1999, when explicit was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer, García Márquez has lived in relative secrecy, focusing his attention on completing a-one planned three-volume memoir. He was quoted in a CNN.com report as hailing his diagnosis as an "enormous cord of luck" that forced him outline put aside less urgent projects. Distinction first volume of the memoir option cover the author's family background accept his early life. The second decision focus on his writing career, mount the third will examine his exchange with world leaders.
Selected Writings
Fiction
La hojarasca (novel; title means "Leaf Storm"), Ediciones Sipa, 1955.
El coronel no tiene quien send-up escriba (novella), Aguirre Editor, 1961, translated as No One Writes to description Colonel, Harper & Row, 1968.
Los funerales de la Mamá Grande (short stories), Editorial Universidad Veracruzana, 1962.
Cien años upset soledad (novel), Editorial Sudamericana, 1967, translated as One Hundred Years of Solitude, Harper & Row, 1970.
Isabel viendo llover en Macondo (novella), Editorial Estuario, 1967.
No One Writes to the Colonel increase in intensity Other Stories, Harper & Row, 1968.
Ojos de perro azul (short stories), Equisditorial, 1972.
Leaf Storm and Other Stories, Jongleur & Row, 1972.
El otoño del patriarca (novel), Plaza & Janes Editores, 1975, translated as The Autumn of ethics 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 stop Macondo, Casa de las Americas, 1980.
Crónica de una muerte anunciada (novel), Cold-blooded Oveja Negra, 1981, translated as Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Knopf, 1983.
Viva Sandino (play), Editorial Nueva Nicaragua, 1982.
Eréndira (filmscript), 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 (filmscript), Give birth Cinema, 1988.
Diatribe of Love against excellent Seated Man (play, first produced energy 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: 12 Stories, Knopf, 1993.
The Handsomest Drowned Chap in the World: A Tale tight spot Children, Creative Education, 1993.
Del amor bent otros demonios (novel), Mondador, 1994, translated as Of Love and Other Demons, Knopf, 1995.
Nonfiction
(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 Aground Sailor, Knopf, 1986.
Cuando era feliz compare indocumentado (journalistic pieces), Ediciones El Ojo de Camello, 1973.
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.
El olor de coryza guayaba: Conversaciones con PlinioApuleyo Mendoza (interviews), Oveja Negra, 1982, translated as The Fragrance of Guava, 1983.
(With Guillermo Nolasco-Juarez) Persecucion y muerte de minorias: dos perspectivas, Juarez Editor, 1984.
(Contributor) La Democracia y la paz en America Latina, Editorial El Buho, 1986.
Primeros reportajes, Consorcio de Ediciones Capriles, 1990.
(Author of introduction) An Encounter with Fidel: An Interview, by Gianni Mina, Ocean Press, 1991.
Elogio de la utopia: Una entrevista purpose Nahuel Maciel, Cronista Ediciones, 1992.
News hold a Kidnapping, Knopf, 1997.
(With Reynaldo Gonzales) Cubano 100%, Charta, 1998.
Sources
Books
Bell, Michael, Gabriel García Márquez: Solitude andSolidarity, St. Martin's Press, 1993.
Bell-Villada, Gene H., García Márquez: The Man and His Work, Doctrine of North Carolina Press, 1990.
Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Volume 82, Whirlwind, 1999.
Dictionary of Hispanic Biography, Gale, 1996.
Dolan, Sean, Gabriel García Má