Gabriel García Márquez, born on March 6, 1927, is a Colombian writer and journalist. He was a fundamental figure of the so-called “Latin American Boom” in literature and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. His childhood in Aracataca, Colombia, would decisively mark his work as a writer. The richness of the oral traditions transmitted by his grandparents “Papalelo” and “Tranquilina,” as he called them, nourished much of his work.
Gabriel began to study law in Bogotá, but his career was cut short with the closure of the University after the well-known “Bogotazo,” bloody protests that broke out in the capital as a result of the assassination of the presidential candidate and liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, in 1948. García Márquez then decided to move to Cartagena de Indias, where he worked as a journalist in various media outlets such as El Universal and El Heraldo.
In the following years of his life, journalism became his great passion. At the age of twenty-eight he published his first novel, La hojarasca (1955), in which the trademark characteristics of his work began to take shape. Following that first novel, other texts and short stories were published and he began to build the village of Macondo and some characters of One Hundred Years of Solitude, his most emblematic work and the peak representation of the genre he developed throughout his career: magical realism.
That same year, he traveled to Europe for the first time and stayed there for four years, living in Geneva, Rome, and Paris. During his stay in France, where he went through economic difficulties, he wrote El coronel no tiene quien le escriba and La mala hora.
In 1958, he returned to America and settled temporarily in Venezuela, where he combined an intense journalistic fervor with the writing of the story Los funerales de la Mamá Grande (1962).
Committed to left-wing movements, Gabriel García Márquez closely followed the Cuban guerrilla warfare of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara until its triumph in 1959. As a friend of Fidel Castro, he participated in the founding of Prensa Latina, Cuba’s news agency.
He spent a few months in Cuba, where the revolution had just triumphed, and lived for a while in New York as a correspondent, before deciding to settle in Mexico. There, he worked in advertising and wrote his first screenplay for the cinema, El gallo de oro, in collaboration with Carlos Fuentes, Mexican writer and fellow figure of the Latin American Boom.
After several ups and downs with multiple publishers, García Márquez managed to get an Argentine publisher to publish what many consider his masterpiece and one of the most important novels of universal literature of the twentieth century: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967).
The novel is a mythical recreation of the real world of Latin America, blending reality with fantastic motifs and elements; these are central features of magical realism. García Márquez crafted a realistic story of the founding of the town featured in the novel, its growth, its participation in the civil wars that ravage the country, its exploitation by an American banana company, the subsequent revolutions and counter-revolutions, and the final destruction of the village; meanwhile, the novel also intertwines premonitory dreams, supernatural apparitions, plagues of insomnia, biblical floods, and all kinds of magical events within the reality of the world.
Due to the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez moved to Barcelona, where he lived from 1968 to 1974. While there he wrote El otoño del patriarca and stories such as Isabel Watching it Rain in Macondo and The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, a work based on a true story that forced him into exile for revealing the true cause of the shipwreck by carrying contraband shipments on the high seas and not for a storm as reported by the Colombian Navy and the dictatorship of that time.
His stay in Barcelona was decisive for the conception of what became known as the Latin American Boom in literature, which refers to the international discovery of the young narrators of the continent: the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa; Argentines Jorge Luis Borges, Ernesto Sábato and Julio Cortázar; Cubans José Lezama Lima and Guillermo Cabrera Infante; Mexicans Juan Rulfo and Carlos Fuentes; and Uruguayans Juan Carlos Onetti and Mario Benedetti, among others. In 1972, García Márquez won the Rómulo Gallegos International Prize. In the following years he alternated his residence between Mexico, Cartagena de Indias, Havana, and Paris, due to political instability in Colombia.
His work as a journalist was reflected in Textos costeños (1981) and Entre cachacos (1983), a compilation of articles published in the written press, and in Noticia de un secuestro, an extensive report in novel format, published in 1996 about the kidnapping of nine journalists by order of the drug lord Pablo Escobar.
In the cinema he intervened in the writing of numerous scripts, including some adaptations of his own work, and in 1985 he and Argentine filmmaker Fernando Birri founded the International Film School of Havana, where he directed an annual script workshop.
In 1982 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature and later wrote Love in the Time of Cholera. His later work includes a historical novel about Simón Bolívar, El general en su laberinto (1989); the short story collection Doce cuentos peregrinos (1992); Del amor y otros demonios (1994), and the memoir Vivir para contarla (2002), which covers the first thirty years of his life. His last published works are Memoria de mis putas tristes (2004) and Yo no vengo a decir un discurso (2010), an anthology of his lectures.
Márquez died in Mexico City in 2014, after a relapse in lymphatic cancer that had been diagnosed in 1999.
The influence of Gabriel García Márquez’s work on world literature is undeniable, and his work is considered inescapable for emerging generations of authors. Even writers whose language is not Spanish have turned García Márquez into a reference author.
References
Gabriel García Márquez, el maestro del realismo mágico (nationalgeographic.com.es)
Biografia de Gabriel García Márquez (biografiasyvidas.com)
Gabriel García Márquez. Cronología. (biografiasyvidas.com)
Gabriel García Márquez – Departamento de Bibliotecas y Documentación del Instituto Cervantes
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