Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a novelist, short story writer, journalist, critic, and screenwriter who has received international recognition for many years. He is included among the group of South American writers who rose to prominence during the 1960s, a time often referred to as the boom” of Latin American Literature. In his short stories and novels, such as Leaf Storm, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and The Autumn of the Patriarch, he utilizes his background and personal experiences, which make his novels so popular. Garcia Marquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia, on March 6, 1928.
He lived with his grandparents for the first eight years of his life. The storytelling of his grandmother and the myths and superstitions of the townspeople played major roles in shaping his imagination. He enrolled in the University of Bogota in 1947 to study law, but transferred to the University of Cartagna and worked as a journalist for the newspaper El Universal when it was shut down in 1948. Devoting himself to journalism, he ended his law studies in 1950 and moved to Barranquilla to work for the daily paper El Heraldo. He then began to write short stories that were published in regional periodicals and soon became acquainted with the works of authors such as Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. Living with his grandparents had a big effect on his later years and in his novels, especially the house in which they lived.
Marquez remembers his grandparents’ house as a dwelling place of the dead rather than the living. There was an empty room where his Aunt Petra and Uncle Lazarus had died. He said, My grandparents would sit me down at six in the evening in a corner and say to me, ‘Don’t move from here because if you do, Aunt Petra, who is in her room, will come or…'”
I always stayed sitting? (Minta 34). In the same manner, his first novel, Leaf Storm, featured a little boy as a character who sat in a small chair throughout the whole novel. Chronicle of a Death Foretold deals with an episode from Garcia Marquez’s past and the murder of a friend in Sucre in 1958 (Gabriel 23). It tells about the codes that men impose on women and women on themselves, the curious notions of honor that can dominate an isolated community, the irresistible impulse toward violence, and the psychology of mass complicity (Marquez 1). Garcia Marquez’s style of writing is what some call magical (Gabriel 319).
His works are usually attributed to his imaginative blending of history, politics, social realism, and fantasy. He often makes use of techniques of magic realism in his works, with descriptive events and reality which, he implies, define human existence (Gabriel 31). One example of this is in One Hundred Years of Solitude, where a baby is born with a pig’s tail” (Gabriel 169). His usual enthusiastic critical response is mostly because of this. In conclusion, Gabriel Garcia Marquez makes a big impression on people’s thoughts. He is a novelist who uses personal trials and tribulations and mixes them with fantasy to make each of his books more interesting.
For these reasons, the critics praise him, and he remains popular. Bibliography: Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Encyclopedia of World Biography. Detroit: Gale Research, 1998.
The Grolier Library of International Biographies. New York: The Philip Leif Group Inc, 1996. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Discovering Authors Modules. Detroit: Gale Research, 1996. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia.
Chronicle of a Death Foretold. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982. Minta, Stephen.
Garcia Marquez is a writer from Colombia. New York: Harper and Row published his work in 1987.
