About Opentopia
Opentopia Directory Encyclopedia Tools

Gabriel García Márquez

Encyclopedia : G : GA : GAB : Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez
Born March 6 1928
Aracataca, Magdalena, Colombia
Occupations novelist, journalist, publisher, and political activist
Genre(s) Magical Realism

Gabriel José García Márquez, also known as Gabo (born March 6, 1928), is a Colombian novelist, journalist, publisher, political activist, and Nobel laureate in literature. Born in the town of Aracataca in the department of Magdalena, he has lived mostly in Mexico and Europe and currently spends much of his time in Mexico City. Widely credited with introducing the global public to magical realism, he has secured both significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success. A growing consensus of literary scholars holds that García Márquez ranks alongside Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar as one of South America's greatest 20th-century authors.

Contents

His life

García Márquez began his career as a reporter and editor for regional newspapers—El Heraldo in Barranquilla and El Universal in Cartagena. Later he moved to Bogotá and worked for the daily El Espectador, then worked as a foreign correspondent in Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Caracas, and New York City.

His first major work was The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (Relato de un náufrago), which he wrote as a newspaper series in 1955. The book told the true story of a shipwreck by exposing the fact that the existence of contraband aboard a Colombian Navy vessel had contributed to the tragedy due to overweight. This resulted in public controversy, as it discredited the official account of the events, which had blamed a storm for the shipwreck and glorified the surviving sailor. This led to the beginning of his foreign correspondence, as García Márquez became a sort of persona non grata for the government of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. The series was later published in 1970 and taken by many to have been a novel.

Several of his works have been classified as both fiction and non-fiction, notably Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Crónica de una muerte anunciada) (1981), which tells the tale of a revenge killing recorded in the newspapers, and Love in the Time of Cholera (El amor en los tiempos del cólera) (1985), which is loosely based on the story of his parents' courtship. Many of his works, including those two, take place in the "García Márquez universe", in which characters, places, and events re-appear from book to book.

His most commercially successful novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad) (1967; English translation by Gregory Rabassa 1970), has sold more than ten million copies. It chronicles several generations of the Buendía family who live in a fictional South American village called Macondo. García Márquez won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1972 for One Hundred Years of Solitude. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982, with his short stories and novels cited as the basis for the award.[link]

In 1999, he was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. This event incited him to start writing his memoirs. In 2000, his death was incorrectly reported by Peruvian daily newspaper La Republica.

In 2002, he published the memoir Vivir para contarla, the first of a projected three-volume autobiography. The book was a bestseller in the Spanish-speaking world. Edith Grossman's English translation, Living to Tell the Tale, was published in November 2003 and has become another bestseller. On September 10, 2004, the Bogotá daily El Tiempo announced a new novel, Memoria de mis putas tristes, a love story that was published the following October with a first print run of one million copies.

García Márquez is also noted for his friendship with, and enthusiasm for, Fidel Castro and has previously expressed sympathy for some Latin American revolutionary groups, especially during the 1960s and 1970s. He has also been critical of the political situation in Colombia. Despite accusations made by members of the Colombian government decades ago, there is no evidence that he has openly supported guerrilla groups such as the FARC and ELN that operate in Colombia. Since the early 1980s, García Márquez has occasionally acted as a low profile facilitator, usually in a role that he has shared with Fidel Castro, in several of the attempts at negotiations between the government and the guerrillas.

He is the father of television and film director Rodrigo Garcia.

Bibliography

Novels

Short stories, novellas, and collections

Non-fiction

Critical bibliography

See also

External links

Nobel Prize in Literature: Laureates (1976-2000)
1976: Bellow | 1977: Aleixandre | 1978: Singer | 1979: Elytis | 1980: Miłosz | 1981: Canetti | 1982: García Márquez | 1983: Golding | 1984: Seifert | 1985: Simon | 1986: Soyinka | 1987: Brodsky | 1988: Mahfouz | 1989: Cela | 1990: Paz | 1991: Gordimer | 1992: Walcott | 1993: Morrison | 1994: Oe | 1995: Heaney | 1996: Szymborska | 1997: Fo | 1998: Saramago | 1999: Grass | 2000: Gao

 

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

Search Titles
0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJ
KLMNOPQRST
UVWXYZ?

E-mail this article to:

Personal Message: