Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Colombian Novelist and Short-Story Writer Known for Magic Realism
Apr 12, 2008
Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of South America's most respected and famous writers. He is best known for One Hundred Years of Solitude, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982. Garcia Marquez is generally regarded as the greatest practitioner of "magic realism."
The term "magic realism" refers, in particular, to works of South American novelists that describe happenings in the real world with excursions into the realm of fantasy. One of his popular books, Love in the Time of Cholera, has been adapted to film.
Early Life
Garcia Marquez was born in Aracataca, on March 6, 1928, in a small town in Colombia. His childhood home was large and extended, and became the inspiration for many of his later works. After studying law in college, Garcia Marquez became a newspaper journalist and began to publish stories and articles in various periodicals.
Career as a Journalist
His work as a journalist took him to Europe and to the South American countries, where he witnessed the oppression and violence suffered by people living under dictatorships. His own country, Colombia, also suffered from political violence.
Garcia Marquez the Novelist
At age 27, Garcia Marquez published his first book, Leafstorm and Other Stories. Macondo, the fictional Colombian town that is the setting for the title story, later became the setting for his most famous book, One Hundred Years of Solitude. He wrote it during a stay in Mexico several years later, and it was published when he was 39.
One Hundred Years of Solitude, which became internationally famous, follows the fortunes of the Buendia family and the provincial town in which they lived from the earliest days of European settlements to the present. Garcia Marquez vividly narrates the lives of the decaying family. It is an allegory of the history of Colombia.
Garcia Marquez's style of writing mixes politics and everyday life in a setting that is full of larger-than-life characters, sex, violence and magical events - a good example of magic realism.
Later Years
However, in his later novel, The General in his Labyrinth, a fictionalized biography of Simon Bolivar, the hero of Latin American independence, according to critics, seems to have marked a departure of the work of Garcia Marquez to a more realistic approach to his subject.
Works by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Leafstorm and other Stories, 1955
- No One Writes to the Colonel, 1958
- One hundred Years of Solitude, 1967
- The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1975
- In Evil Hour, 1979
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1981
- Love in the Time of Cholera, 1985
- The General in his Labyrinth, 1989-1990
- Of Love and Other Demons, 1995
Sources:
Biographical Dictionary, edited by Una McGovern, Chambers (2002)
Dictionary of Literature, Brockhampton Press (1995)
Dictionary of Writers, edited by Rosemary Goring, Larousse (1994)
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