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Professor Noelle Kocot-Tomblin

English 102

December 1st, 2007

Biography of Gabriel Garcia Márquez

Gabriel Garcia Márquez was born on March 6, 1928, in Aracataca, ColombiaSouth America. “Aracataca is a small town located near the Atlantic coast. The town has a small railroad station, a river with clear water and large white boulders, a street of Turks, and a few African Colombians” (Janes 1991, 4).The charisma and popularity of Gabriel García Márquez make him Unique among Spanish American writers of the second half of the twentieth century. The name Gabriel Garcia Marquez now is a common name for scholars and students of Spanish American letters in many countries.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is also called Magic Realism movement. The term was first used in the 1920s Germany to describe some contemporary painters, whose works expressed surrealistic visions. In the late 1940s Cuban novelist Alejos Carpentier started to speak of “lo real maravilloso” Carpentier recognized the tendency of Latin-American writer to combine fantasy elements and mythology. However, Gabriel Garcia Marquez has considered himself fundamentally a realist, who writes about reality of Columbian and Latin American life, as he perceives it.

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“There is a short but telling portrait of the novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, show every morning reads a couple of pages of a

dictionary ( any dictionary except the pompous Diccionario de la

Real Academia Espanola)- a habit our author compares to that of

Stendhal, who perused the Napoleonic Code so as to learn to write in a terse and exact style.” (from a History of Reading by Alberto Manguel, 1996).

In 1940, when Garcia Márquez was twelve, he obtained a scholarship to study at the Colegio Nacional (national secondary school) at Zapaquirá near Bogotá, the capital of Colombia. In 1946 he finished high school and entered the national university in Bogotá to study law. In 1947 he published his first short story, later translated as “The Third Resignation,” in a liberal daily newspaper in Bogotá called El Espectador (The Spectator). A year later he began work as a journalist for the same newspaper. García Márquez’s first publications were all short stories, which appeared from 1947 to 1952 in the newspapers El Espectador of Bogotá and El Heraldo (The Herald) of Barranquilla. During those years he published a total of fifteen short stories.

García Márquez’s first novella, Leaf Storm, was translated into English in 1972, eighteen years after it was published in Spanish and two years after the English-speaking public first read his acclaimed masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude.

In the year of 2002 he published “Live to Tell” the first part of his biography. After ten years since the publication of the Novel

“Of Love and other Demons” Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote another novel called “Memory of my sad Whores”.

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The life of García Márquez is filled with literary prizes, honorary degrees, and friendship with world figures in literature, politics, and the Church. In August 1995, invited by the American author William Styron to a dinner party at Styron’s summer home in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, García Márquez met U.S. President Bill Clinton. At the dinner party, García Márquez reminded President Clinton that during his first campaign for the presidency, Clinton had said that his favorite book was One Hundred Years of Solitude, perhaps in an effort to win the Hispanic vote. Clinton replied that his comment regarding One Hundred Years of Solitude was a sincere one and recited the opening sentence: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

In 1940, when García Márquez was twelve, he obtained a scholarship to study at the Colegio Nacional (national secondary school) at Zapaquirá near Bogotá, the capital of Colombia. In 1946 he finished high school and entered the national university in Bogotá to study law. In 1947 he published his first short story, later translated as “The Third Resignation,” in a liberal daily newspaper in Bogotá called El Espectador (The Spectator). A year later he began work as a journalist for the same newspaper. García Márquez’s first publications were all short stories, which appeared from 1947 to 1952 in the newspapers El Espectador of Bogotá and El Heraldo (The Herald) of Barranquilla. During those years he published a total of fifteen short stories

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In the year of 2002 he published “Live to Tell the Tale” the first part of his biography. After ten years since the publication of the Novel “The Love and Another Demons” Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote another novel called “Memory of my sad Prostitutes”.

In 1982 Garcia Marquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His best known bock is CIEN ANOS DE SOLEDAD (1967, One Hundred Years of Solitude), first published by Editorial Sudamericana in Buenos Aires. “It is the history of Macondo, depicted on a epic level, from its mythic foundation to its final disappearance. Combining the world of the bourgeois family chronicle and Latin american history it explores the limits of narrative fiction, without the sterility of the French nouveau roman” (Janes 1991, 4). One Hundred Years of Solitude become one of the most popular works of Magic Realism.

Gabriel García Márquez belongs in any list of great names in literature. He is probably the best-known Latin American writer of the twentieth century and a genius in his ability to touch people of all cultures and inspire many other writers. His name appears in all anthologies of Latin American Literature, as well as in the encyclopedias of world literature. Garcia Márquez is internationally recognized as a Latin American author of novels and short stories.