One Hundred Years of Solitude (Author Biography)

Author Biography

In 1928, the year when more than one hundred local strikers were massacred, García Márquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia. His first years were spent with a large extended family in his grandfather's house in Aracataca. This environment contributed greatly to his future career as a writer. His grandfather, Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía, took him to the circus, told him stories, and admonished him against listening to the tales of women. His grandmother, Tranquilina Iguarán de Márquez, told him fantastically superstitious stories with such a deadpan style that he was more often scared than not. It was this style that the author used to such great success in his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude. After his grandfather died, García Márquez went to live in Sucre, Colombia, with his parents, telegraph operator Gabriel Eligio García (a Conservative frowned on by the family) and Luisa Santiaga Márquez de García.

He won a scholarship to the Liceo Nacional de Zipaquirá, a high school near Bogotá. He then entered the National University in the capital city of Bogotá to study law. After liberal political leader Jorge Gaitán was assassinated in 1948, civil war broke out and he had to transfer to the University of Cartagena. Disliking law and encouraged by the writing of Franz Kafka (especially Metamorphosis), he took up writing. He left school and began working for several newspapers, including El Espectador in Bogotá.

A 1955 serialization of a shipwrecked Colombian almost brought García Márquez journalistic fame. The journalist's account of the sailor's story, however, scandalized the government. Fearing reprisal, the newspaper's editors sent him to Europe but military dictator General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla shut down the El Espectador for other reasons. Bereft of his steady source of income, García Márquez worked as a freelance writer in Paris. Meanwhile, friends rescued his novella La hojarasca (translated as Leaf Storm) from a drawer. Published in 1955, it drew little attention. Although Rojas stepped down in 1957, it was still unsafe for the journalist to return home. He moved to Caracas, Venezuela, and, in 1958, he married the "the most interesting person" he had ever met: Mercedes Barcha, whom he first encountered in 1946, when she was thirteen. Their first child, Rodrigo, was born in 1959; their second, Gonzalo, in 1962.

In 1959, García Márquez went to Cuba, where he befriended its socialist leader, Fidel Castro. He set up Prensa Latina, a Cuban press agency, in Bogotá, and reported for them from Cuba and New York. (These Cuban connections later caused visa problems for García Márquez with America as Cuban-American relations soured.) García Márquez then settled in Mexico City in 1961, where he worked in film and advertising. Finally solving his Macondo puzzle in 1965, he sequestered himself for eighteen months and emerged with One Hundred Years of Solitude. After its success, the family moved to Barcelona, Spain, where his study of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco contributed to the 1975 novel El otoño del patriarca (translated as The Autumn of the Patriarch). After that novel, García Márquez swore he would be silent until Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, leader of a military coup against the elected government in 1973, stepped down. Fortunately, he recanted; subsequent novels, including Crónica del muerte anunciada (1981, translated as Chronicle of a Death Foretold), El amor en los tiempos del Cólera (1985, translated as Love in the Time of Cholera), and El general en su laberinto (1989, translated as The General in His Labyrinth), were published to great acclaim.

In 1982 the exiled native son was awarded the Nobel Prize and was welcomed home to Colombia with honors. Currently, he divides his time between Mexico City and Bogotá and continues to write fiction, nonfiction, and screenplays, as well as a weekly news column.