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With the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967, a previously struggling Colombian novelist named Gabriel García Márquez became an immediate and permanent worldwide success. Other impressive novels followed, and their author's stature in contemporary world literature was confirmed when he received the Nobel Prize in 1982, only fifteen years after his emergence. He has become neither cowed nor complacent in the face of his enormous success, and, as even his most recent publications demonstrate, he remains as artistically supple and politically committed as ever.
Gabriel García Márquez was born on March 6, 1928, in Aracata, Colombia, a small town near the coast of the Atlantic Ocean, in that nation's Caribbean region, which is regarded as exotic even in other parts of Colombia. He was the first of sixteen children born to Gabriel Eligio García, a telegraph operator, and his wife, Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán. Shortly after his birth, the family left Aracata, leaving Gabriel there to be raised by his maternal grandparents. One may find in these early years the first seeds of García Márquez's fictional techniques and preoccupations: his grandmother, Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, told him of ghosts and other supernatural beings as if they were the most natural things in the world, and his grandfather, Colonel Nicolás Márquez Iguarán, told the boy equally fantastic stories based on his participation in the Colombian civil wars in the early years of the century. When Gabriel was eight, his grandfather died. Gabriel was sent to school in Zipaquirá, a town near the capital city of Bogotá. He completed his high school education in 1946, and in 1947 he enrolled at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá in order to study law. Also in 1947 appeared the first of fifteen short stories that he would publish in Colombian newspapers over the next five years. The following year saw the beginning of a decade-long period of violence and political instability in Colombia, which led García Márquez to transfer to the National University of Cartagena, a coastal city.
At this time, he also began to work as a journalist, writing for El Universal in Cartagena. In one of his 1949 articles, he mentions William Faulkner. It was his discovery of Faulkner's work, García Márquez later said, that inspired him to become a writer. Moving to Barranquilla in 1950, he continued his journalistic career, writing for El Heraldo, and became a member of a gathering of young writers and intellectuals who called themselves the Group of Barranquilla. Through their reading and passionate discussion of such novelists as Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, John Dos Passos, and Virginia Woolf, they grounded themselves in the experimental narrative techniques of modernist fiction. His reading of Kafka's The Metamorphosis also led García Márquez to the realization that serious literature could be based on ideas as fantastic as his own. It was at this time that he abandoned his law studies and decided to pursue a career as a writer.
In 1954, he moved to Bogotá, where he became a reporter for El Espectador. In the following year, his literary career was launched when he won an award for his story "One Day After Saturday" and published Leaf Storm, his first novella. Also in 1955, he was sent to Europe by his newspaper, which shortly thereafter was shut down by the Colombian government. García Márquez was to spend the next three years in Europe, living a threadbare existence in Paris, where he devoted himself to his fiction, and also touring Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, travels that exposed him to a very different way of life from anything that he had known in Colombia. Upon his return in 1958, he married Mercedes Barcha, a pharmacist from Barranquilla. They would become the parents of two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.
In 1958, García Márquez published No One Writes to the Colonel, a novella, in the Colombian magazine Mito. It was published in book form three years later. Two books would appear in 1962: Big Mama's Funeral, a collection of short stories, and In Evil Hour, his first full-length novel. In the wake of the Cuban revolution in 1959, which was warmly greeted by most Latin American intellectuals, he went to work for the Bogotá branch of the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina, a position that led to extended stays in Havana and New York before internal dissension led him to resign in 1961. After a bus tour through the American South, largely for the purpose of visiting Faulkner's Mississippi, he moved his family to Mexico, where he eked out a living for the next several years as a journalist, public relations representative, and film scriptwriter. In 1965, according to his own testimony, he finally began to see how to fit together the bits and pieces of a novel that had been forming in his head for the past several years. With his imagination and creative energies fired by the prospect, he suspended all other activities for a year and a half in order to write his book. By the time of its completion, he and his family were so impoverished that they could barely afford to mail the manuscript to a publisher in Argentina. Interest in the novel had been created through enthusiastic prepublication notices by Carlos Fuentes of Mexico and Julio Cortázar of Argentina, two of Latin America's leading novelists. Upon its publication in May 1967, One Hundred Years of Solitude became an instant sensation, acclaimed as the most important Latin American novel of the age, eliciting rave reviews, and, after selling out its first edition in less than a week, exhausting printing after printing. In the next several years, as translations appeared, it won awards and became a bestseller in Italy, France, the United States, and many other countries, bringing García Márquez an international reputation and forever ending his financial difficulties.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of those rare works of fiction that exist on many levels simultaneously. Rich, dreamilke, filled with tragicomic incidents narrated in a poetic style, it is set in the fictional (and microcosmic) town of Macondo, and it tells the story of the Buendía family, commencing with an incestuous union whose dire consequences are fulfilled in a birth several generations later. Many of its incidents--civil wars, the intrusion of American business interests, a massacre of striking banana workers--have a historical basis in the history of Colombia in particular and of Latin America in general. On a more mythic level, the novel enacts a fable of human development from loss of primal innocence through the rise and fall of civilization. Filled with bizarre and impossible occurrences--flights on magic carpets, resurrection after death, lifespans of nearly a century and a half--described in the most matter-of-fact tone, the book is a prime example of the mode of "magic realism," whose origins are attributed to the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier. Its thesis is that the true story of Latin America cannot be captured through purely realistic techniques, but requires a surreal, at times hallucinatory approach to communicate its essence. Since the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez has been recognized as the principal exponent of the magical realism tradition.
The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), his next novel, was more overtly political, having as its central figure a dictator who had ruled for so long that no one could remember a time when he was not in power. Disjointed in narrative sequence and, like its predecessor, replete with fantastic incidents, it met with a generally positive reception, although there were those who complained of its relative plotlessness and the great length of its sentences, feeling that it was more concerned with its own style and techniques than with its ostensible subject matter. Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981) also experimented with the narrative framework, describing the same incident from multiple perspectives and generating suspense over the outcome of an incident whose conclusion is known from the opening paragraph. Reviewers once again praised García Márquez's deft handling of his materials, as well as his often sly satire--overlaid with sympathy for those imprisoned by its imperatives--of the macho code of his native region. The year after its publication, the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to García Márquez certified his eminent standing among contemporary writers.
Although receipt of the Nobel Prize has often seemed to administer a deathblow to its recipient's creativity, this has certainly not been the case with García Márquez. In Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), he addressed the complexities and nuances of man-woman relationships and the unquenchable spirit of passion that refuses to submit gracefully to the coming of old age. The General in His Labyrinth (1989) takes his work in yet another direction, as it treats of the last months in the life of Simon Bolivar, South America's legendary liberator and Colombia's first president. Just as these works demonstrate the continuing breadth and fertility of his imagination, News of a Kidnapping (1996), his most recent work, a nonfiction account of the kidnappings of a number of Colombian journalists by the Medellín drug cartel, bears witness to his undiminished concern with the ills of his native country. It is because of this combination of artistry and conscience that Gabriel García Márquez continues to be one of the most rewarding and important writers in the world today.
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