Gabriel GarcÌa M·rquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia, South America, on March 6, 1928, to Gabriel Eligio GarcÌa and Luisa Santiaga M·rquez. His father was a Conservative and a pharmacist by profession. He moved with his wife to Barranquilla shortly after Gabriel was born. The boy was raised by his maternal grandparents in Aracataca until he was eight years old when he rejoined his parents in Barranquilla. From his war hero grandfather, a Liberal Colonel in the Thousand Days Civil War, he heard stories about the country, which shaped his political views as a socialist and anti-imperialist. His grandmother’s matter-of-fact acceptance of the supernatural as part of everyday life also contributed to his eventual “magical realism” style of writing.
GarcÌa M·rquez studied law at the University of Cartagena and became a journalist for El Universal from 1948 to 1949. From 1950 to 1952 he wrote a column for El Heraldo in Barranquilla. He became part of the circle of writers known as the Barranquilla Group, which gave him inspiration to write. He was influenced by Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner in terms of their narrative stream-of-consciousness techniques. From 1954 to 1955 he was a film critic for El Espectador in Bogat· and then went to Europe as a foreign correspondent. GarcÌa M·rquez married Mercedes Barcha in 1958, and their son, Rodrigo, who became a film director, was born the next year. In 1961, the family moved to Mexico City, where Gonzalo was born, now a graphic designer in Mexico.
Leaf Storm, his first novella, was published in 1955. In Mexico he had the inspiration to write about his grandfather’s house and sold his car so his family could live while he wrote fulltime. The result was published in 1967 as One Hundred Years of Solitude, his first commercial success. It tells of several generations of one family in the mythical town of Macondo. He won the RÛmulo Gallegos Prize for the novel. GarcÌa M·rquez moved his family to Barcelona, Spain, for many years where he earned international recognition. His friendship with Fidel Castro, which he claims is intellectual, led to his being barred from the United States for many years. Autumn of the Patriarch, about the fall of a dictator, was published in Spain in 1975. After he moved his family back to Mexico City, he published Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981) based on a true murder story.
In 1982 GarcÌa M·rquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in 1985 he published Love in the Time of Cholera. After successfully battling lymphoma in 1999, he realized it was time to work on his memoirs. In 2002, he brought out the first volume, called Living to Tell the Tale. In 2004, he published a love novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, which was eventually banned in Iran. He has served as Head of the Latin American Film Foundation and has written several screenplays and a TV series in the 1990s. Many film adaptations have been made of his stories, including Love in the Time of Cholera, filmed in Cartagena (2007).
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