Merelyn Aragon
Professor Noelle Kocot-Tomblin
English 102
December 1st, 2007
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Biography of Gabriel Garcia Márquez
Gabriel Garcia Márquez was born on March 6, 1928, in
Aracataca, Colombia South 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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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 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.
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