- Born:
- March 6, 1927, Aracataca,
Colombia
Top Questions
Where was Gabriel Garcia Marquez born and raised?
Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in the provincial town of Aracataca in
Colombia
, where he and his family lived with his maternal grandparents for the first eight years of his life. After his grandfather’s death, they moved to
Barranquilla
, a river port.
What was Gabriel Garcia Marquez best known for?
When was Gabriel Garcia Marquez born and when did he die?
He was born on March 6, 1927, and he died on April 17, 2014, at the age of 87.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
(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 anos 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 Angel Asturias
in 1967. With
Jorge Luis Borges
, Garcia Marquez 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, Garcia Marquez achieved the rare feat of being accessible to the common reader while satisfying the most demanding of sophisticated critics.
Life
Born in the sleepy provincial town of Aracataca,
Colombia
, Garcia Marquez and his parents spent the first eight years of his life with his maternal grandparents, Colonel Nicolas Marquez (a veteran of the War of a Thousand Days [1899?1903]) and Tranquilina Iguaran Cotes de Marquez. After Nicolas’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 Nicolas had told him. Although he studied law, Garcia Marquez 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
Bogota
, 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 Garcia Marquez supported) provided him with a mansion.
Britannica Quiz
Novels and Novelists Quiz
Works
Before 1967 Garcia Marquez 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 Garcia Marquez 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 Garcia Marquez 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, Garcia Marquez issued
El otono del patriarca
(1975;
The Autumn of the Patriarch
),
Cronica de una muerte anunciada
(1981;
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
),
El amor en los tiempos del colera
(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
Simon Bolivar
’s last days. In 1996 Garcia Marquez published a journalistic chronicle of drug-related kidnappings in his native Colombia,
Noticia de un secuestro
(
News of a Kidnapping
).
Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria
After being diagnosed with cancer in 1999, Garcia Marquez 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
Garcia Marquez 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. Garcia Marquez’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 Gonzalez Echevarria