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Hall of Writers & Poets
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude
- 1927 – 2014
- Writers & Poets · 12 of 12
Hall of Writers & Poets
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Fetching the article from Wikipedia…
Gabriel José García Márquez (Latin American Spanish: [ɡaˈβɾjel ɣaɾˈsi.a ˈmaɾ.kes] ⓘ; 6 March 1928 – 17 April 2014) was a Colombian writer and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo ([ˈɡaβo]) or Gabito ([ɡaˈβito]) throughout Latin America. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, particularly in the Spanish language, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. He pursued a self-directed education that resulted in leaving law school for a career in journalism. From early on he showed no inhibitions in his criticism of Colombian and foreign politics. In 1958, he married Mercedes Barcha Pardo; they had two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.
García Márquez started as a journalist and wrote many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories. He is best known for his novels, such as No One Writes to the Colonel (1961); One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), which has sold over fifty million copies worldwide; Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981); and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). His works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for popularizing a literary style known as magic realism, which uses magical elements and events in otherwise ordinary and realistic situations. Some of his works are set in the fictional village of Macondo (mainly inspired by his birthplace, Aracataca), and most of them explore the theme of solitude. As of 2023, he is the most-translated Spanish-language author of the 21st century. In 1982, he was awarded 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". He was the fourth Latin American to receive the honor, following Chilean poets Gabriela Mistral (1945) and Pablo Neruda (1971), as well as Guatemalan novelist Miguel Ángel Asturias (1967). Alongside Jorge Luis Borges, García Márquez is regarded as one of the most renowned Latin American authors in history.
Upon García Márquez's death in April 2014, Juan Manuel Santos, the president of Colombia, called him "the greatest Colombian who ever lived".
Gabriel García Márquez was born on 6 March 1928 in the small town of Aracataca, in the Caribbean region of Colombia, to Gabriel Eligio García and Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán. Soon after García Márquez was born, his father became a pharmacist and moved with his wife to the nearby large port city of Barranquilla, leaving young Gabriel in Aracataca. He was raised by his maternal grandparents, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán and Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía. In December 1936, his father took him and his brother to Sincé. However, when his grandfather died in March 1937, the family moved first (back) to Barranquilla and then on to Sucre, where his father started a pharmacy.
When his parents had fallen in love, their relationship was met with resistance from Luisa Santiaga Márquez's father, the Colonel. Gabriel Eligio García was not the man the Colonel had envisioned winning the heart of his daughter: Gabriel Eligio was a Conservative, and had the reputation of being a womanizer. Gabriel Eligio wooed Luisa with violin serenades, love poems, countless letters, and even telephone messages after her father sent her away with the intention of separating the young couple. Her parents tried everything to get rid of the man, but he kept coming back, and it was obvious their daughter was committed to him. Her family finally capitulated and gave her permission to marry him (The tragicomic story of their courtship would later be adapted and recast as Love in the Time of Cholera.)
Since García Márquez's parents were more or less strangers to him for the first few years of his life, his grandparents influenced his early development very strongly. His grandfather, whom he called "Papalelo", was a Liberal veteran of the Thousand Days War. The Colonel was considered a hero by Colombian Liberals and was highly respected. He was well known for his refusal to remain silent about the banana massacres that took place the year after García Márquez was born. The Colonel, whom García Márquez described as his "umbilical cord with history and reality", was also an excellent storyteller. He taught García Márquez lessons from the dictionary, took him to the circus each year, and was the first to introduce his grandson to ice—a "miracle" found at the United Fruit Company store. He would also occasionally tell his young grandson "You can't imagine how much a dead man weighs", reminding him that there was no greater burden than to have killed a man, a lesson that García Márquez would later integrate into his novels.
García Márquez's grandmother, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, played an important and influential role in his upbringing. He was inspired by the way she "treated the extraordinary as something perfectly natural." The house was filled with stories of ghosts and premonitions, omens and portents, all of which were studiously ignored by her husband. According to García Márquez, she was "the source of the magical, superstitious and supernatural view of reality". He enjoyed his grandmother's 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, heavily influenced her grandson's most popular novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
After arriving at Sucre, it was decided that García Márquez should start his formal education and he was sent to an internship in Barranquilla, a port on the mouth of the Río Magdalena. There, he gained a reputation of being a timid boy who wrote humorous poems and drew humorous comic strips. Serious and little interested in athletic activities, he was called El Viejo by his classmates. He attended a Jesuit college to study law. After his graduation in 1947, García Márquez stayed in Bogotá to study law at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, but spent most of his spare time reading fiction. He was inspired by The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, at the time incorrectly thought to have been translated by Jorge Luis Borges. His first published work, "La tercera resignación", appeared in the 13 September 1947 edition of the newspaper El Espectador. From 1947 to 1955, he wrote a series of short stories that were later published under the title of "Eyes of a Blue Dog".
Though his passion was writing, he continued with law in 1948 to please his father. After the Bogotazo riots on 9 April following the assassination of a popular leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the university closed indefinitely and his boarding house was burned. García Márquez transferred to the Universidad de Cartagena and began working as a reporter of El Universal. In 1950, he ended his legal studies to focus on journalism and moved again to Barranquilla to work as a columnist and reporter in the newspaper El Heraldo. Universities, including Columbia University in the City of New York, have given him an honorary doctorate in writing.
García Márquez began his career as a journalist while studying law at the National University of Colombia. In 1948 and 1949, he wrote for El Universal in Cartagena. From 1950 until 1952, he wrote a "whimsical" column under the name of "Septimus" for the local paper El Heraldo in Barranquilla. García Márquez noted of his time at El Heraldo, "I'd write a piece and they'd pay me three pesos for it, and maybe an editorial for another three." During this time 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. He worked with inspirational figures such as Ramon Vinyes, whom García Márquez depicted as an Old Catalan who owns a bookstore in One Hundred Years of Solitude. At this time, García Márquez was also introduced to the works of writers such as Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. Faulkner's narrative techniques, historical themes and use of rural locations influenced many Latin American authors. From 1954 to 1955, García Márquez spent time in Bogotá and regularly wrote for Bogotá's El Espectador. From 1956, he spent two years in Europe, returning to marry Mercedes Barcha in Barranquilla in 1958, and to work on magazines in Caracas, Venezuela.
García Márquez was a "committed leftist" throughout his life, adhering to socialist beliefs. In 1991, he published Changing the History of Africa, an admiring study of Cuban activities in the Angolan Civil War and the larger South African Border War. He maintained a close but "nuanced" friendship with Fidel Castro, praising the achievements of the Cuban Revolution but criticizing aspects of governance and working to "soften [the] roughest edges" of the country. García Márquez's political and ideological views were shaped by his grandfather's stories. In an interview, García Márquez told his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, "my grandfather the Colonel was a Liberal. My political ideas probably came from him to begin with because, instead of telling me fairy tales when I was young, he would regale me with horrifying accounts of the last civil war that free-thinkers and anti-clerics waged against the Conservative government." This influenced his political views and his literary technique so that "in the same way that his writing career initially took shape in conscious opposition to the Colombian literary status quo, García Márquez's socialist and anti-imperialist views are in principled opposition to the global status quo dominated by the United States."
Ending in controversy, his last domestically written editorial for El Espectador was a 1955 series of 14 news articles in which he revealed the hidden story of how a Colombian Navy vessel's shipwreck "occurred because the boat contained a badly stowed cargo of contraband goods that broke loose on the deck." García Márquez compiled this story through interviews with a young sailor who survived the wreck. In response to this controversy, El Espectador sent García Márquez away to Europe to be a foreign correspondent. He wrote about his experiences for El Independiente, a newspaper that briefly replaced El Espectador during the military government of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla and was later shut down by Colombian authorities. García Márquez's background in journalism provided a foundational base for his writing career. Literary critic Bell-Villada noted, "Owing to his hands-on experiences in journalism, García Márquez is, of all the great living authors, the one who is closest to everyday reality."
García Márquez was one of the original founders of QAP, a Colombian newscast that aired between 1992 and 1997. He was attracted to the project by the promise of editorial and journalistic independence.
García Márquez met Mercedes Barcha while she was at school; he was 14 and she was 9. When he was sent to Europe as a foreign correspondent, Mercedes waited for him to return to Barranquilla. Finally, they married in 1958. The following year, their first son, Rodrigo García, now a television and film director, was born. In 1961, the family traveled by Greyhound bus throughout the southern United States and eventually settled in Mexico City. García Márquez had always wanted to see the Southern United States because it inspired the writings of William Faulkner. Three years later, the couple's second son, Gonzalo García, was born in Mexico. As of 2001, Gonzalo is a graphic designer in Mexico City.
In January 2022, it was reported that García Márquez had a daughter, Indira Cato, from an extramarital affair with Mexican writer Susana Cato in the early 1990s. Indira is a documentary producer in Mexico City.
Leaf Storm (La Hojarasca) is García Márquez's first novella and took seven years to find a publisher, finally being published in 1955. García Márquez notes that "of all that he had written (as of 1973), Leaf Storm was his favorite because he felt that it was the most sincere and spontaneous." All the events of the novella take place in one room, during a half-hour period on Wednesday 12 September 1928. It is the story of an old colonel (similar to García Márquez's own grandfather) who tries to give a proper Christian burial to an unpopular French doctor. The colonel is supported only by his daughter and grandson. The novella explores the child's first experience with death by following his stream of consciousness. The book reveals the perspective of Isabel, the Colonel's daughter, which provides a feminine point of view.
In Evil Hour (La mala hora), García Márquez's second novel, was published in 1962. Its formal structure is based on novels such as Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. The narrative begins on the saint's day of St Francis of Assisi, but the murders that follow are far from the saint's message of peace. The story interweaves characters and details from García Márquez's other writings such as Artificial Roses, and comments on literary genres such as whodunnit detective stories. Some of the characters and situations found in In Evil Hour re-appear in One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Gabriel García Márquez”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.