García Márquez, << gahr SEE ah MAHR kays, >> Gabriel (1927-2014), was a Colombian novelist. Many critics consider him one of the most important authors in the history of Latin American literature. He won the 1982 Nobel Prize in literature.
García Márquez achieved international fame in 1967 with the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude. This novel tells the story of the Buendia family, who live in the isolated jungle town of Macondo. The exploits of the family and the history of the town are often tragic. However, García Márquez described these events in the form of a humorous tall tale. The novel has been interpreted as a symbolic history of Latin America told with mythical characters and places.
García Márquez’s first works were the short novels Leaf Storm (1955) and No One Writes to the Colonel (1958). Like his major novel, these stories are set in Macondo. A later novel, The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), tells the story of a general who rules his country as a dictator for 100 years. The novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1983) is a dreamlike story of a brutal murder in a small town. The novel Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) is a story of love in an unnamed Latin American city. The General In His Labyrinth (1989) is a fictional biography of the South American liberator Simón Bolívar. News of a Kidnapping (1997) is a nonfiction account of several kidnappings in Colombia in 1990 and 1991. The short novel Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004) describes the sexual desire of an elderly writer.
García Márquez also wrote short stories, which were published in Collected Stories (1984) and Strange Pilgrims (1993). His Living to Tell the Tale (2002) is a memoir. His journalistic writings from the 1940’s to the 1980’s are collected in The Scandal of the Century, published in 2019, after his death.
Gabriel José García Márquez was born on March 6, 1927, in Aracataca, Colombia, near Fundación. In 1954 and 1955, he worked in Paris as a foreign correspondent for a Colombian newspaper. During that period, the newspaper published a series of articles by García Márquez that angered the Colombian government. The government shut down the newspaper, and García Márquez lived outside of Colombia most of the time until his death on April 17, 2014.
See also Boom; One Hundred Years of Solitude.
