Gabriel García Márquez
(born March 6, 1927, Aracataca, Colombia—died April 17, 2014,
Mexico City
, Mexico) was a Colombian novelist and one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, mostly for his masterpiece
Cien años de soledad
(1967;
One Hundred Years of Solitude
). He was the fourth Latin American to be so honoured, having been preceded by Chilean poets
Gabriela Mistral
in 1945 and
Pablo Neruda
in 1971 and by Guatemalan novelist
Miguel Ángel Asturias
in 1967. With
Jorge Luis Borges
, García Márquez is the best-known Latin American writer in
history
. In addition to his masterly approach to the
novel
, he was a
superb
crafter of
short stories
and an accomplished journalist. In both his shorter and longer fictions, García Márquez achieved the rare feat of being accessible to the common reader while satisfying the most demanding of sophisticated critics.
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Life
Born in the sleepy provincial town of Aracataca,
Colombia
, García Márquez and his parents spent the first eight years of his life with his maternal grandparents, Colonel Nicolás Márquez (a veteran of the War of a Thousand Days [1899–1903]) and Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes de Márquez. After Nicolás’s death, they moved to
Barranquilla
, a river port. He received a better-than-average education but claimed as an adult that his most important literary sources were the stories about Aracataca and his family that Nicolás had told him. Although he studied law, García Márquez became a journalist, the trade at which he earned his living before
attaining
literary fame. As a correspondent in Paris during the 1950s, he expanded his education, reading a great deal of
American literature
, some of it in French translation. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, he worked in
Bogotá
, Colombia, and then in
New York City
for Prensa Latina, the
news service
created by the regime of Cuban leader
Fidel Castro
. Later he moved to Mexico City, where he wrote the novel that brought him fame and wealth. From 1967 to 1975 he lived in Spain. Subsequently he kept a house in Mexico City and an apartment in Paris, but he also spent much time in
Havana
, where Castro (whom García Márquez supported) provided him with a mansion.
Novels and Novelists Quiz
Works
Before 1967 García Márquez had published two novels,
La hojarasca
(1955;
The Leaf Storm
) and
La mala hora
(1962;
In Evil Hour
); a novella,
El coronel no tiene quien le escriba
(1961;
No One Writes to the Colonel
); and a few short stories. Then came
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, in which García Márquez tells the story of Macondo, an isolated town whose history is like the history of
Latin America
on a reduced scale. While the setting is realistic, there are fantastic episodes, a combination that has come to be known as “
magic realism
,” wrongly thought to be the peculiar feature of all
Latin American literature
. Mixing historical facts and stories with instances of the fantastic is a practice that García Márquez derived from Cuban master
Alejo Carpentier
, considered to be one of the founders of magic realism. The inhabitants of Macondo are driven by elemental passions—lust, greed, thirst for power—which are thwarted by crude societal, political, or natural forces, as in Greek tragedy and
myth
.
Continuing his magisterial output, García Márquez issued
El otoño del patriarca
(1975;
The Autumn of the Patriarch
),
Crónica de una muerte anunciada
(1981;
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
),
El amor en los tiempos del cólera
(1985;
Love in the Time of Cholera
; filmed 2007),
El general en su laberinto
(1989;
The General in His Labyrinth
), and
Del amor y otros demonios
(1994;
Of Love and Other Demons
). The best among those books are
Love in the Time of Cholera
, about a touching love affair that takes decades to be
consummated
, and
The General in His Labyrinth
, a chronicle of
Simón Bolívar
’s last days. In 1996 García Márquez published a journalistic chronicle of drug-related kidnappings in his native Colombia,
Noticia de un secuestro
(
News of a Kidnapping
).
Roberto González Echevarría
After being diagnosed with cancer in 1999, García Márquez wrote the
memoir
Vivir para contarla
(2002;
Living to Tell the Tale
), which focuses on his first 30 years. He returned to fiction with
Memoria de mis putas tristes
(2004;
Memories of My Melancholy Whores
), a novel about a lonely man who finally discovers the meaning of love when he hires a virginal prostitute to celebrate his 90th birthday.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Legacy
García Márquez was known for his capacity to create vast, minutely woven plots and brief, tightly knit narratives in the fashion of his two North American models,
William Faulkner
and
Ernest Hemingway
. The easy flow of even the most intricate of his stories has been compared to that of
Miguel de Cervantes
, as have his
irony
and overall humour. García Márquez’s novelistic world is mostly that of provincial Colombia, where
medieval
and modern practices and beliefs clash both comically and tragically.
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Roberto González Echevarría
