Gabriel García Márquez facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Gabriel García Márquez
García Márquez in 2002
Born	Gabriel José García Márquez (1927-03-06)6 March 1927 Aracataca, Colombia
Died	17 April 2014(2014-04-17) (aged 87) Mexico City, Mexico
Language	Spanish
Alma mater	National University of Colombia University of Cartagena
Genre	Novels short stories
Literary movement	Latin American Boom magic realism
Notable works	One Hundred Years of Solitude The Autumn of the Patriarch Love in the Time of Cholera Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Notable awards	Neustadt International Prize for Literature 1972 Nobel Prize in Literature 1982
Spouse	Mercedes Barcha ​ (m. 1958)​
Children	3, including Rodrigo García
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Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez (Spanish pronunciation: [ɡaˈβɾjel ɣaɾˈsi.a ˈmaɾkes]; 6 March 1927 – 17 April 2014) was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter, and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo ([ˈɡaβo]) or Gabito ([ɡaˈβito]) throughout Latin America. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, particularly in the Spanish language, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Upon García Márquez's death in April 2014, Juan Manuel Santos, the president of Colombia, called him "the greatest Colombian who ever lived."

Early life

García Márquez billboard in Aracataca: "I feel Latin American from whatever country, but I have never renounced the nostalgia of my homeland: Aracataca, to which I returned one day and discovered that between reality and nostalgia was the raw material for my work".—Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez was born on 6 March 1927 in Aracataca, Colombia, to Gabriel Eligio García and Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán. Soon after García Márquez was born, his father became a pharmacist and moved, with his wife, to Barranquilla, leaving young Gabriel in Aracataca. He was raised by his maternal grandparents, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán and Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía. In December 1936 his father took him and his brother to Sincé, while in March 1937 his grandfather died; the family then moved first (back) to Barranquilla and then on to Sucre, where his father started a pharmacy.

When his parents fell in love, their relationship met with resistance from Luisa Santiaga Márquez's father, the Colonel. Gabriel Eligio García was not the man the Colonel had envisioned winning the heart of his daughter. Gabriel Eligio wooed Luisa with violin serenades, love poems, countless letters, and even telephone messages after her father sent her away with the intention of separating the young couple. Her parents tried everything to get rid of the man, but he kept coming back, and it was obvious their daughter was committed to him. Her family finally capitulated and gave her permission to marry him (The tragicomic story of their courtship would later be adapted and recast as Love in the Time of Cholera.)

Since García Márquez's parents were more or less strangers to him for the first few years of his life, his grandparents influenced his early development very strongly. His grandfather, whom he called "Papalelo", was a Liberal veteran of the Thousand Days War. The Colonel was considered a hero by Colombian Liberals and was highly respected. He was well known for his refusal to remain silent about the banana massacres that took place the year after García Márquez was born. The Colonel, whom García Márquez described as his "umbilical cord with history and reality," was also an excellent storyteller. He taught García Márquez lessons from the dictionary, took him to the circus each year, and was the first to introduce his grandson to ice—a "miracle" found at the United Fruit Company store.

García Márquez's grandmother, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, played an influential role in his upbringing. He was inspired by the way she "treated the extraordinary as something perfectly natural." The house was filled with stories of ghosts and premonitions, omens and portents, all of which were studiously ignored by her husband. According to García Márquez she was "the source of the magical, superstitious and supernatural view of reality". He enjoyed his grandmother's unique way of telling stories. No matter how fantastic or improbable her statements, she always delivered them as if they were the irrefutable truth. It was a deadpan style that, some thirty years later, heavily influenced her grandson's most popular novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Education and adulthood

After arriving at Sucre, it was decided that García Márquez should start his formal education and he was sent to an internship in Barranquilla, a port on the mouth of the Río Magdalena. There, he gained a reputation of being a timid boy who wrote humorous poems and drew humorous comic strips. Serious and little interested in athletic activities, he was called El Viejo by his classmates.

García Márquez spent his first years of high school, from 1940, in the Colegio jesuita San José (today Instituto San José), where he published his first poems in the school magazine Juventud. Later, thanks to a scholarship given to him by the government, Gabriel was sent to study in Bogotá, then was relocated to the Liceo Nacional de Zipaquirá, a town one hour away from the capital, where he would finish his secondary studies.

During his time at the Bogotá study house, he excelled in various sports, becoming team captain of the Liceo Nacional Zipaquirá team in three disciplines: soccer, baseball, and track.

After his graduation in 1947, García Márquez stayed in Bogotá to study law at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, but spent most of his spare time reading fiction. La metamorfosis by Franz Kafka, at the time incorrectly thought to have been translated by Jorge Luis Borges, was a work that especially inspired him. He was excited by the idea of writing, not traditional literature, but in a style similar to his grandmother's stories, in which she "inserted extraordinary events and anomalies as if they were simply an aspect of everyday life." His desire to be a writer grew. A little later he published his first work, "La tercera resignación," which appeared in the 13 September 1947 edition of the newspaper El Espectador.

Though his passion was writing, he continued with law in 1948 to please his father. After the Bogotazo riots on 9 April following the assassination of popular leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the university closed indefinitely and his boarding house was burned. García Márquez transferred to the Universidad de Cartagena and began working as a reporter of El Universal. In 1950 he ended his legal studies to focus on journalism and moved again to Barranquilla to work as a columnist and reporter in the newspaper El Heraldo. Though García Márquez never finished his higher studies, some universities, including Columbia University in the City of New York, have given him an honorary doctorate in writing.

Politics

García Márquez was a "committed leftist" throughout his life, adhering to socialist beliefs. In 1991 he published Changing the History of Africa, an admiring study of Cuban activities in the Angolan Civil War and the larger South African Border War. He maintained a close but "nuanced" friendship with Fidel Castro, praising the achievements of the Cuban Revolution but criticizing aspects of governance and working to "soften [the] roughest edges" of the country. García Márquez's political and ideological views were shaped by his grandfather's stories. In an interview, García Márquez told his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, "my grandfather the Colonel was a Liberal. My political ideas probably came from him to begin with because, instead of telling me fairy tales when I was young, he would regale me with horrifying accounts of the last civil war that free-thinkers and anti-clerics waged against the Conservative government." This influenced his political views and his literary technique so that "in the same way that his writing career initially took shape in conscious opposition to the Colombian literary status quo, García Márquez's socialist and anti-imperialist views are in principled opposition to the global status quo dominated by the United States."

Marriage and family

García Márquez met Mercedes Barcha while she was at school; he was 12 and she was 9. When he was sent to Europe as a foreign correspondent, Mercedes waited for him to return to Barranquilla. Finally, they married in 1958. The following year, their first son, Rodrigo García, now a television and film director, was born. In 1961, the family traveled by Greyhound bus throughout the southern United States and eventually settled in Mexico City. García Márquez had always wanted to see the Southern United States because it inspired the writings of William Faulkner. Three years later, the couple's second son, Gonzalo García, was born in Mexico. Gonzalo is currently a graphic designer in Mexico City.

In January 2022, it was reported that García Márquez had a daughter, Indira Cato, with Mexican writer Susana Cato in the early 1990s. Indira is a documentary producer in Mexico City.

Writing career

García Márquez started as a journalist and wrote many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best known for his novels, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985).

His works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for popularizing a literary style known as magic realism, which uses magical elements and events in otherwise ordinary and realistic situations. Some of his works are set in the fictional village of Macondo (mainly inspired by his birthplace, Aracataca), and most of them explore the theme of solitude.

"Gabo" wearing a "sombrero vueltiao" hat, typical of the Colombian Caribbean region. Most of the stories by García Márquez revolve around the idiosyncrasy of this region.

García Márquez was noted for leaving out seemingly important details and events so the reader is forced into a more participatory role in the story development. For example, in No One Writes to the Colonel, the main characters are not given names.

One Hundred Years of Solitude

García Márquez sold his car so his family would have money to live on while he wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude. Writing the novel took far longer than he expected; he wrote every day for 18 months. His wife had to ask for food on credit from their butcher and baker as well as nine months of rent on credit from their landlord. When the book was published in 1967, it became his most commercially successful novel, selling over 50 million copies. The story chronicles several generations of the Buendía family from the time they founded the fictional South American village of Macondo, through their trials and tribulations, and instances of births and deaths.

The novel was widely popular and led to García Márquez's Nobel Prize as well as the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1972. William Kennedy has called it "the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race," and hundreds of articles and books of literary critique have been published in response to it.

García Márquez signing a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude in Havana, Cuba

Bill Clinton cited One Hundred Years of Solitude as his favorite novel.

Film and opera

García Márquez with the Colombian Culture Minister Paula Moreno (left) at the Guadalajara International Film Festival, in Guadalajara, Mexico, in March 2009

Critics often describe the language that García Márquez's imagination produces as visual or graphic, and he himself explains each of his stories is inspired by "a visual image," so it comes as no surprise that he had a long and involved history with film. He was a film critic, he founded and served as executive director of the Film Institute in Havana, was the head of the Latin American Film Foundation, and wrote several screenplays. For his first script he worked with Carlos Fuentes on Juan Rulfo's El gallo de oro. His other screenplays include the films Tiempo de morir (1966), (1985) and Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes (1988), as well as the television series Amores difíciles (1991).

García Márquez also originally wrote his Eréndira as a third screenplay. However, this version was lost and replaced by the novella. Nonetheless, he worked on rewriting the script in collaboration with Ruy Guerra and the film was released in Mexico in 1983.

Several of his stories have inspired other writers and directors. In 1987, the Italian director Francesco Rosi directed the movie Cronaca di una morte annunciata based on Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Several film adaptations have been made in Mexico, including Miguel Littín's La Viuda de Montiel (1979), Jaime Humberto Hermosillo's Maria de mi corazón (1979), and Arturo Ripstein's El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (1998).

British director Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral) filmed Love in the Time of Cholera in Cartagena, Colombia, with the screenplay written by Ronald Harwood (The Pianist). The film was released in the U.S. on 16 November 2007.

His novel Of Love and Other Demons was adapted and directed by a Costa Rican filmmaker, Hilda Hidalgo, who is a graduate of the Film Institute at Havana where García Márquez would frequently impart screenplay workshops. Hidalgo's film was released in April 2010. The same novel was adapted by Hungarian composer Péter Eötvös to form the opera Love and Other Demons, premiered in 2008 at Glyndebourne Festival.

Death

García Márquez died of pneumonia at the age of 87 on 17 April 2014, in Mexico City. His body was cremated at a private family ceremony in Mexico City. On 22 April the presidents of Colombia and Mexico attended a formal ceremony in Mexico City, where García Márquez had lived for more than three decades. A funeral cortege took the urn containing his ashes from his house to the Palacio de Bellas Artes, where the memorial ceremony was held. Earlier, residents in his home town of Aracataca in Colombia's Caribbean region held a symbolic funeral. In February 2015, the heirs of Gabriel García Marquez deposited a legacy of the writer in his Memoriam in the Caja de las Letras of the Instituto Cervantes.

Legacy

García Márquez's work is an important part of the Latin American Boom of literature, often defined around his works, and those of Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa. His work has challenged critics of Colombian literature to step out of the conservative criticism that had been dominant before the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Following his death, García Márquez's family made the decision to deposit his papers and some of his personal effects at The University of Texas at Austin's Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum.

Nobel Prize

García Márquez received the Nobel Prize in Literature on 10 December 1982 "for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts". His acceptance speech was entitled "The Solitude of Latin America". García Márquez was the first Colombian and fourth Latin American to win a Nobel Prize for Literature. After becoming a Nobel laureate, García Márquez stated to a correspondent: "I have the impression that in giving me the prize, they have taken into account the literature of the sub-continent and have awarded me as a way of awarding all of this literature".

García Márquez in fiction

• A year after his death, García Márquez appears as a notable character in Claudia Amengual's novel Cartagena, set in Uruguay and Colombia.
• In John Green's novel Looking for Alaska, García Márquez is mentioned several times.
• In Reinaldo Arenas's novel The Color of Summer, or the New Garden of Earthly Delights, García Marquez is vilified as "Gabriel García Markoff".
• In Giannina Braschi's Empire of Dreams, the protagonist Mariquita Samper shoots the narrator of the Latin American Boom, presumed by critics to be the figure of García Marquez; in Braschi's Spanglish novel Yo-Yo Boing! characters debate the importance of García Marquez and Isabel Allende during a heated dinner party scene.

List of works

Novels

• In Evil Hour (1962)
• One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
• The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975)
• Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)
• The General in His Labyrinth (1989)
• Of Love and Other Demons (1994)

Novellas

• Leaf Storm (1955)
• No One Writes to the Colonel (1961)
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981)

Short story collections

• Eyes of a Blue Dog (1947)
• Big Mama's Funeral (1962)
• The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother (1972)
• Collected Stories (1984)
• Strange Pilgrims (1993)

Non-fiction

• The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (1970)
• The Solitude of Latin America (1982)
• The Fragrance of Guava (1982, with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza)
• Clandestine in Chile (1986)
• Changing the History of Africa: Angola and Namibia (1991, with David Deutschmann)
• News of a Kidnapping (1996)
• A Country for Children (1998)
• Living to Tell the Tale (2002)
• The Scandal of the Century: Selected Journalistic Writings, 1950–1984 (2019)

Films

Adaptations based on his works

• There Are No Thieves in This Village (1965, Alberto Isaac)
• Patsy, My Love (1969, Manuel Michel, based on a non-published story)
• The Widow of Montiel (1979, Miguel Littín)
• The Sea of Lost Time (1980, Solveig Hoogesteijn)
• One Hundred Years of Solitude (1981, Shūji Terayama)
• Farewell to the Ark (1984, Shūji Terayama)
• Time to Die (1984, Jorge Alí Triana)
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1987, Francesco Rosi)
• The Summer of Miss Forbes (1989, Jaime Humberto Hermosillo)
• I'm the One You're Looking For (1989, Jaime Chávarri)
• Only Death Is Bound to Come (1992, Marina Tsurtsumia)
• Bloody Morning (1993, Shaohong Li)
• No One Writes to the Colonel (1999, Arturo Ripstein)
• In Evil Hour (2005, Ruy Guerra)
• Love in the Time of Cholera (2007, Mike Newell)
• Of Love and Other Demons (2009, Hilda Hidalgo)
• Encanto (2021, Walt Disney Animation Studios)

See also

In Spanish: Gabriel García Márquez para niños

• Latin American Boom
• Latin American Literature
• McOndo
• Vallenato