Gabriel García Márquez (American Spanish: [ɡaˈβɾjel ɣaɾˈsi.

a ˈmaɾkes] (audio speaker

iconlisten);[a] 6 March 1927 – 17 April 2014) was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer,
screenwriter, and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo [ˈɡaβo] or Gabito [ɡaˈβito]
throughout Latin America.[b] 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.[1] 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;[2] they had two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.[3]

García Márquez started as a journalist and wrote many acclaimed non-fiction works and short
stories, but is best known for his novels, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967),
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.

Upon García Márquez's death in April 2014, Juan Manuel Santos, the president of Colombia,
called him "the greatest Colombian who ever lived."[4]
Contents

1 Biography
1.1 Early life
1.1.1 Education and adulthood
1.2 Journalism
1.3 Politics
1.3.1 The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor
1.4 QAP
1.5 Marriage and family
1.6 Leaf Storm
1.7 In Evil Hour
1.8 One Hundred Years of Solitude
1.9 Fame
1.10 Autumn of the Patriarch
 1.11 The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother
1.12 Chronicle of a Death Foretold
1.13 Love in the Time of Cholera
1.14 News of a Kidnapping
1.15 Living to Tell the Tale and Memories of My Melancholy Whores
1.16 Film and opera
1.17 Later life and death
1.17.1 Declining health
1.17.2 Death and funeral
2 Style
2.1 Realism and magical realism
3 Themes
3.1 Solitude
3.2 Macondo
3.3 La Violencia
4 Legacy
4.1 Nobel Prize
5 García Márquez in fiction
6 List of works
6.1 Novels
6.2 Novellas
6.3 Short story collections
6.4 Non-fiction
6.5 Films
6.6 Adaptations based on his works
7 See also
8 Notes
9 References
9.1 General bibliography
10 Further reading
 11 External links

Biography
Early life
García Márquez billboard in Aracataca: "I feel Latin 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 reality and nostalgia was the raw material for my work".—
Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez was born on 6 March 1927[c] in Aracataca, Colombia, to Gabriel
Eligio García and Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán.[5] Soon after García Márquez was born,
his father became a pharmacist and moved, with his wife, to Barranquilla, leaving young
Gabriel in Aracataca.[6] He was raised by his maternal grandparents, Doña Tranquilina
Iguarán and Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía.[7] In December 1936 his father took
him and his brother to Sincé, while in March 1937 his grandfather died; the family then
moved first (back) to Barranquilla and then on to Sucre, where his father started a pharmacy.
[8]

When his parents fell in love, their relationship 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.[9][10] 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.
[9] Her family finally capitulated and gave her permission to marry him[11][12] (The
tragicomic story of their courtship would later be adapted and recast as Love in the Time of
Cholera.)[10][13]

Since García Márquez's parents were more or less strangers to him for the first few years of
his life,[14] his grandparents influenced his early development very strongly.[15][16] His
grandfather, whom he called "Papalelo",[15] was a Liberal veteran of the Thousand Days
War.[17] The Colonel was considered a hero by Colombian Liberals and was highly
respected.[18] He was well known for his refusal to remain silent about the banana massacres
that took place the year after García Márquez was born.[19] The Colonel, whom García
Márquez described as his "umbilical cord with history and reality,"[20] was also an excellent
storyteller.[21] 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.[22] He would also occasionally tell his young grandson "You can't
imagine how much a dead man weighs",[23][24] 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 influential role in
his upbringing. He was inspired by the way she "treated the extraordinary as something
perfectly natural."[25] The house was filled with stories of ghosts and premonitions, omens
and portents,[26] all of which were studiously ignored by her husband.[15] According to
García Márquez she was "the source of the magical, superstitious and supernatural view of
reality".[20] 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.[27]
Education and adulthood

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.[28]

García Márquez spent his first years of high school, from 1940, in the Colegio jesuita San
José (today Instituto San José), where he published his first poems in the school magazine
Juventud. Later, thanks to a scholarship given to him by the government, Gabriel was sent to
study in Bogotá, then was relocated to the Liceo Nacional de Zipaquirá, a town one hour
away from the capital, where he would finish his secondary studies.

During his time at the Bogotá study house, he excelled in various sports, becoming team
captain of the Liceo Nacional Zipaquirá team in three disciplines: soccer, baseball, and track.

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. La
metamorfosis by Franz Kafka, particularly in the false translation of Jorge Luis Borges,[29]
was a work that especially inspired him. He was excited by the idea of writing, not traditional
literature, but in a style similar to his grandmother's stories, in which she "inserted
extraordinary events and anomalies as if they were simply an aspect of everyday life." His
desire to be a writer grew. A little later he published his first work, "La tercera resignación",
which appeared in the 13 September 1947 edition of the newspaper El Espectador.
Though his passion was writing, he continued with law in 1948 to please his father. After the
so-called "Bogotazo" in 1948, some bloody disturbances that happened 9 April caused by the
assassination of 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. Though García Márquez never finished his higher studies, some
universities, including Columbia University, New York, have given him an honorary
doctorate in writing.[28]
Journalism

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.[30] 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."[31] 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.[32] 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.[33] The environment of
Barranquilla gave García Márquez a world-class literary education and a unique perspective
on Caribbean culture. From 1954 to 1955, García Márquez spent time in Bogotá and
regularly wrote for Bogotá's El Espectador. He was a regular film critic.

In December 1957 García Márquez accepted a position in Caracas with the magazine
Momento directed by his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza. He arrived in the Venezuelan
capital on 23 December 1957, and began working right away at Momento. García Márquez
also witnessed the 1958 Venezuelan coup d'état, leading to the exile of the president Marcos
Pérez Jiménez. Following this event, García Márquez wrote an article, "The participation of
the clergy in the struggle", describing the Church of Venezuela opposition against Jiménez's
regime. In March 1958 he made a trip to Colombia, where he married Mercedes Barcha and
together they returned to Caracas. In May 1958, disagreeing with the owner of Momento, he
resigned and became shortly afterwards editor of the newspaper Venezuela Gráfica.[citation
needed]
Politics

García Márquez was a "committed leftist" throughout his life, adhering to socialist beliefs.
[34] 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.[35] García Márquez's political and ideological views were shaped by his
grandfather's stories.[23] 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."[16][36] 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."[37]
The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor
Main article: The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor

Ending in controversy, his last domestically written editorial for El Espectador was a series of
14 news articles[32][38] 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."[39] García Márquez compiled this story through
interviews with a young sailor who survived the wreck.[38] The articles resulted in public
controversy, as they discredited the official account of the events, which had blamed a storm
for the shipwreck and glorified the surviving sailor.

In response to this controversy El Espectador sent García Márquez away to Europe to be a

foreign correspondent.[40] He wrote about his experiences for El Independiente, a newspaper
that briefly replaced El Espectador during the military government of General Gustavo Rojas
Pinilla[41] and was later shut down by Colombian authorities.[33] 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 realit