We explain who Gabriel García Márquez was, what his career was like and his literary influences. In addition, we explain his characteristics, works and awards.
García Márquez is considered the greatest exponent of magical realism.
Who was Gabriel García Márquez?
Gabriel García Márquez, known as Gabo —the pseudonym with which the editor Eduardo Zalamea Borda, director of the newspaper, would call him The viewer– was a Colombian journalist, writer, screenwriter and editorconsidered the greatest exponent of literary magical realism and one of the most celebrated writers in the country.
His work is among the best known in Latin America, especially his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), winner of numerous international awards, and is part of the so-called “Latin American Boom”as the wave of Latin American writers who emerged in the 1960s and were promoted by the Spanish literary agent Carmen Balcells was known in Spain and around the world.
García Márquez was very popular both for his literary and journalistic genius, as well as for his openly leftist political stancesHis friendship with Cuban leader Fidel Castro was well-known and controversial both within and outside the literary world.
See also: Ruben Dario
Birth of Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Gabriel Jose de la Concordia Garcia Marquez Born in Aracatacaa Colombian town in the department of Magdalena, on March 6, 1927, son of Gabriel Eligio García and Luisa Santiaga Márquez.
His upbringing initially took place with his grandparentsuntil later he was able to move with his parents to Sucre, in Barranquilla, in 1929.
Brief biography of Gabriel García Márquez
García Márquez published his first story in the newspaper El Espectador.
Garcia Marquez was a shy and serious young mannot very fond of physical activities, who wrote humorous poems and drew comic strips in classes at the boarding school where he studied in Barranquilla.
He began studying law at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá, and in those years He published his first story: “The Third Resignation”In the diary The viewer.
In March 1958 he married Mercedes Barchadaughter of the apothecary of her town in Barranquilla, with whom she had two children: Rodrigo and Gonzalo.
He did not complete his law degreesince the university was closed after the Bogotazo riots, so he decided to devote himself fully to journalism. He never completed his higher education.
Journalistic work of Gabriel García Márquez
Gabo lived most of his life in Mexico City.
Garcia Marquez He started as a journalist in the newspaper The universalThen in The Herald and in 1961 he settled with his wife and first child in New York, as a correspondent for the Latin press.
However, pressures and threats from Cuban dissidents in the country and from the CIA forced him to move to Mexico City, where he lived most of his life. His ties to Fidel Castro and his political stances earned him the classification of “subversive” by the American government.
Literary influences of Gabriel García Márquez
García Márquez was close to the Barranquilla Group, a literary gathering that operated between 1940 and the end of the 1950s. There he was able to read the great Anglo-Saxon realist narrators: Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and especially William Faulknerwho was a huge influence on his own work.
Also He was an admirer of the tragedies of ancient Greecelike those of Sophocles, and on more than one occasion he confessed the importance that the Colombian iconoclastic poetic movement called “stone and sky” of 1939 had for him.
Literary characteristics of his work
Gabo sought to reconcile his grandmother’s stories with his political concerns.
His work It is mainly framed in magical realisma narrative movement characterized by the coexistence of fantastic or mythical phenomena in a realistic story and of which García Márquez is the greatest exponent along with the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias.
In the case of Gabo, his literary project sought to reconcile the childhood stories of his grandmother with her political concerns and Latin Americanists. To this end, he takes up the “wonderful real” that the Cuban Alejo Carpentier enunciated. His style generated both massive support and a huge audiovisual success, as well as accusations of exoticism. To everything, he always responded that there was not a single line in his novels that was not inspired by reality.
Major literary works of Gabriel García Márquez
García Márquez’s narrative work consists mainly of novels, short stories, journalistic reports, memoirs, television scripts, dramatic pieces and fictionalized reports. His best-known works are:
- The colonel has no one to write to him (novel, 1961)
- One Hundred Years of Solitude (novel, 1967)
- A Chronicle of a Death Foretold (novel, 1981)
- Love in the Time of Cholera (novel, 1985)
- Story of a castaway (novel report, 1970)
- Mama Grande’s funeral (stories, 1962)
- Blue dog eyes (stories, 1972)
- Twelve pilgrim tales (stories, 1992)
- Live to tell (memoirs, 2002)
Awards and recognitions of Gabriel García Márquez
In 1982, García Márquez received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
García Márquez won numerous awards celebrating his thought and work, including:
- Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.
- Esso Novel Prize in 1961.
- Romulo Gallegos Prize in 1972.
- Honorary Doctorate from Columbia University in New York in 1971.
- Aztec Eagle Decoration of Mexico (1982).
- Medal of the French Legion of Honour in Paris (1981).
- His birthplace in Aracataca was rebuilt in 2010 and turned into a museum in his name.
- In 2008, a cultural center named after him was built in Mexico.
- In 2015, his face appeared on a new series of Colombian banknotes.
Political activism of García Márquez
Gabo maintained years of friendship with the Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro.
Gabo adhered to a socialist worldviewwithout being a member of any political party or assuming a communist status. Like many intellectuals of the time, he sympathized with the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro, with whom he maintained years of friendship.
At the same time traveled to the countries of communist Eastern Europe: Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary and the USSR, and then wrote chronicles expressing his disagreement with what was happening there.
The Nobel acceptance speech was titled The loneliness of Latin America and there he expresses many of his political and philosophical considerations regarding his vision of the future of the continent.
Garcia Marquez in fiction
Garcia Marquez appears as a fictional character in the novels Cartagena (2015) by Claudia Amengual, and The songwriterMany of his works have also been adapted into film and television fiction.
Death of Garcia Marquez
Garcia Marquez died in Mexico City in April 2014diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. His death marked three days of mourning in Colombia.