García Márquez, Gabriel

García Márquez, Gabriel (gäbrēĕl` gärsē`ä mär`kās), 1928–, Colombian novelist, short-story writer, and journalist, b. Aracataca. Widely considered the greatest living Latin American master of narrative, García Márquez won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. He began his literary career while a law student in Barranquilla, publishing stories in local magazines. He left Colombia in the late 1950s and has since lived in many places, later in life mainly in Mexico City. Drawing on his own history and that of his family, town, and nation and reflecting the influence of writers such as Jorges Luis Borges, Miguel Angel Asturias, and Alejo Carpentier, his work focuses on the physical and moral travail of coastal Colombia, which is given universal meaning in his books.

His two masterpieces One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967, tr. 1970), his best-known work, and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985, tr. 1988), present his central themes of violence, solitude, and the overwhelming human need for love. García Márquez's style marks a high point in Latin American magic realism; it is rich and lucid, mixing reality and fantasy. Among his other works are Leaf Storm and Other Stories (1955, tr. 1972), No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories (1958, tr. 1968), Innocent Erendira and Other Stories (1972, tr. 1978), The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975, tr. 1976), The General in His Labyrinth (1989, tr. 1990), Of Love and Other Demons (1994, tr. 1995), and Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004, tr. 2005). His nonfiction work News of a Kidnapping (1996, tr. 1997) chronicles drug-related abductions in Colombia. Living to Tell the Tale (2002, tr. 2003) is the first of a projected three-volume autobiography.

Bibliography

See studies by M. Wood (1990) and H. Oberhelman (1991); collections of critical essays ed. by B. McGuirle and R. A. Cardwell (1987), J. Ortega (1988), and H. Bloom (1989).

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García Márquez, Gabriel (José)

Gabriel García Márquez, 1982.

(credit: © Lutfi Ozkok)

(born March 6, 1928, Aracataca, Colom.) Latin American writer. He worked many years as a journalist in Latin American and European cities and later also as a screenwriter and publicist, before settling in Mexico. His best-known work, the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), recounts the history of the fictional village of Macondo, the setting of much of his work; enormously admired and influential, it became the principal vehicle for the style known as magic realism. Later novels include The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), The General in His Labyrinth (1989), and Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004). His collections of short stories and novellas include No One Writes to the Colonel (1968) and Leaf Storm (1955). In 2002 he published Vivir para contrarla, an autobiographical account of his early years. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

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García Márquez, Gabriel 

Born 1928, in Aracataca, Colombia. Colombian writer.

García Márquez has been the author of screenplays, a reporter for the liberal newspaper El Espectador both in Bogotá and Europe, and a correspondent from 1959 to 1960 for the Cuban Prensa Latina agency. His novellas Leaf Storm (1955), No One Writes to the Colonel (1958), and An Ill Time (1962) are written in a realistic style with strong critical themes. He introduced fantasy into his stories for the first time in the collection Mama Grande’s Funeral (1962). This fantastic element became one of the primary artistic devices of his epic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; Russian translation, 1970), but Colombian history serves as its real base. Marked by a complicated multileveled structure, the novel presents a satirical picture of bourgeois civilization.

WORKS

In Russian translation:
Sto let odinochestva. Afterword by V. Stolbov. Moscow, 1971.

REFERENCES

“Buendia, Makondo i mir.” Latinskaia Amerika, 1971, no. 3.
“Revoliutsionnyi dolg pisatelia—pisat’ khorosho’ (Gabriel’ Garsia Markes o svoem tvorchestve i o sebe),” Inostrannaia literatura, 1971, no. 6.
Recopilación de textos sobre Gabriel García Márquez. Havana, 1969.

V. S. STOLBOV