Literature / Writers Datebook: March 6
Brief biography of Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, novelist and short story writer, noted for magical realism stories, and famous for his book, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Gabriel García Márquez is one of South America's most respected and famous writers. He is best known for One Hundred Years of Solitude, awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982. Garcia Marques is generally regarded as the greatest practitioner "magic realism".
The term "magic realism" refers in particular, to works of South American novelists in which are describes happenings in the real world with excursions into the realm of fantasy.
Early Life
Garcia Marquez was born in Aracataca, on March 6, 1928, in a small town in Colombia. His childhood home was large and extended, and became the inspiration for many of his later work. After studying law in college, Garcia Marquez became a newspaper journalist and began to publish stories and articles in various periodicals.
Career as a Journalist
His work as a journalist took him to Europe and to the South American countries, where he witnessed the oppression and violence suffered by people living under dictatorships. His own country, Colombia, also suffered from political violence.
The Novelist
At the age 27, Garcia Marquez published his first book, Leafstorm and Other Stories. Macondo, the fictional Colombian town that is the setting for the title story, later became the setting for his most famous book, One Hundred Years of Solitude. He wrote it during a stay in Mexico several years later, and it was published when he was 39.
One Hundred Years of Solitude, which became internationally famous, follows the fortunes of the Buendia family and the provincial town in which they live from the earliest days pf European settlements to the present. Garcia Marquez vividly narrates the lives of the decaying family. It is an allegory of the history of Colombia.
Garcia Marquez's style of writing mixed politics and everyday life in a settling that was full of larger-than-life characters, sex, violence and magical events - a good example of magic realism.
Later Years
However, in his later novel, The General in his Labyrinth, a fictionalized biography of Simon Bolivar, the hero of Latin American independence, according to critics, seemed to mark a departure of the work of Garcia Marquez in a more realistic approach to his subject.
Works by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Leafstorm and other Stories, 1955
No One Writes to the Colonel, 1958
One hundred Years of Solitude, 1967
The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1975
In Evil Hour, 1979
Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1981
Love in the Time of Cholera, 1985
The General in his Labyrinth, 1989-1990
Of Love and Other Demons, 1995
Photo credit:
Gabriel Garcia Marquez. NNDB.com
Resources:
Biographical Dictionary, edited by Una McGovern, Chambers (2002)
Dictionary of Writers, edited by Rosemary Goring, Larousse (1994)
Guide to Literature in English, by Ian Ousby, Cambridge University Press (1993)
(c) March 2009. Updated March 6, 2024. Tel. Inspired Pen Web. All rights reserved.
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