Billboard of Gabriel García Márquez

Biography

[edit] Early life

Billboard of Gabriel García Márquez in Aracataca. It reads: "I feel Latin American from whatever country, but I have never renounced the nostalgia of my homeland: Aracataca, to which I returned one day and discovered that between reality and nostalgia was the raw material for my work". —Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez was born on March 6, 1927 in the town of Aracataca, Colombia, to Gabriel Eligio García and Luisa Santiaga Márquez.[2][3] Soon after García Márquez was born, his father became a pharmacist. In January 1929, his parents moved to Sucre [4][5] while García Marquez stayed in Aracataca. He was raised by his maternal grandparents, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán and Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía.[4][6] When he was nine, his grandfather died, and he moved to his parents' home in Sucre where his father owned a pharmacy.[7][8]

When his parents fell in love, their relationship met with resistance from Luisa Santiaga Marquez's father, the Colonel. Gabriel Eligio García was not the man the Colonel had envisioned winning the heart of his daughter: he (Gabriel Eligio) was a Conservative, and had the reputation of being a womanizer.[9][10] Gabriel Eligio wooed Luisa with violin serenades, love poems, countless letters, and even telegraph messages after her father sent her away with the intention of separating the young couple. Her parents tried everything to get rid of the man, but he kept coming back, and it was obvious their daughter was committed to him.[9] Her family finally capitulated and gave her permission to marry him [11][12] (The tragicomic story of their courtship would later be adapted and recast as Love in the Time of Cholera[10][13]).

Since García Márquez's parents were more or less strangers to him for the first few years of his life,[4] his grandparents influenced his early development very strongly.[14][15] His grandfather, whom he called "Papalelo",[14] was a Liberal veteran of the Thousand Days War.[16] The Colonel was considered a hero by Colombian Liberals and was highly respected.[17] He was well known for his refusal to remain silent about the banana massacres that took place the year García Márquez was born.[18] The Colonel, whom García Márquez has described as his "umbilical cord with history and reality,"[5] was also an excellent storyteller.[19] He taught García Márquez lessons from the dictionary, took him to the circus each year, and was the first to introduce his grandson to ice—a "miracle" found at the United Fruit Company store.[20] He would also occasionally tell his young grandson "You can't imagine how much a dead man weighs",[21][22] reminding him that there was no greater burden than to have killed a man, a lesson that García Márquez would later integrate into his novels.

García Márquez's political and ideological views were shaped by his grandfather's stories.[21] In an interview, García Márquez told his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, "my grandfather the Colonel was a Liberal. My political ideas probably came from him to begin with because, instead of telling me fairy tales when I was young, he would regale me with horrifying accounts of the last civil war that free-thinkers and anti-clerics waged against the Conservative government."[23][24] This influenced his political views and his literary technique so that "in the same way that his writing career initially took shape in conscious opposition to the Colombian literary status quo, García Márquez's socialist and anti-imperialist views are in principled opposition to the global status quo dominated by the United States."[25]

García Márquez's grandmother, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, played an equally influential role in his upbringing. He was inspired by the way she "treated the extraordinary as something perfectly natural."[7] The house was filled with stories of ghosts and premonitions, omens and portents,[26] all of which were studiously ignored by her husband.[14] According to García Márquez she was "the source of the magical, superstitious and supernatural view of reality".[5] He enjoyed his grandmother's unique way of telling stories. No matter how fantastic or improbable her statements, she always delivered them as if they were the irrefutable truth. It was a deadpan style that, some thirty years later, heavily influenced her grandson's most popular novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude.[27]

[edit] Journalism

García Márquez began his career as a journalist while studying law at the National University of Colombia. In 1948 and 1949 he wrote for El Universal in Cartagena. Later, from 1950 until 1952, he wrote a "whimsical" column under the name of "Septimus" for the local paper El Heraldo in Barranquilla.[28] García Márquez noted of his time at El Heraldo, "I'd write a piece and they'd pay me three pesos for it, and maybe an editorial for another three."[29] During this time he became an active member of the informal group of writers and journalists known as the Barranquilla Group, an association that provided great motivation and inspiration for his literary career. He worked with inspirational figures such as Ramon Vinyes, whom García Márquez depicted as an Old Catalan who owns a bookstore in One Hundred Years of Solitude.[30] At this time, García Márquez was also introduced to the works of writers such as Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. Faulkner's narrative techniques, historical themes and use of rural locations influenced many Latin American authors.[31] The environment of Barranquilla gave García Márquez a world-class literary education and provided him with a unique perspective on Caribbean culture. From 1954 to 1955, García Márquez spent time in Bogotá and regularly wrote for Bogotá's El Espectador. He was a regular film critic which drove his interest in film.

[edit] The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor

Main article: The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor

Ending in controversy, his last domestically written editorial for El Espectador was a series of fourteen news articles[30][32] in which he revealed the hidden story of how a Colombian Navy vessel's shipwreck "occurred because the boat contained a badly stowed cargo of contraband goods that broke loose on the deck."[33] García Márquez compiled this story through interviews with a young sailor who survived the shipwreck.[32] The publication of the articles resulted in public controversy, as they discredited the official account of the events, which had blamed a

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