Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The genius, popularity, and charisma of Gabriel Garcia Marquez make him peerless among Spanish American writers of the second half of the twentieth century. The name Gabriel Garcia Marquez is as synonymous with One Hundred Years of Solitude as is the name of Spanish novelist, playwright, and poet Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616) with Don Quixote. Grouping the names of Garcia Marquez and Cervantes is not as arbitrary as it may seem. In fact, most literary oriented people around the world have come to associate the name of each of these authors, directly or indirectly, with one particular work out of the many that they wrote. Though Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to date, is an active and prolific writer, he continues to be primarily associated with his 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The life of Garcia Marquez is filled with literary prizes, homages, honorary degrees, and friendship with world figures in literature, politics, and the Church. Among the list of friends most frequently mentioned by scholars are Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, British novelist Graham Greene, French President Francois Miterrand, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, Panamanian nationalist General Omar Torrijos, and the Colombian priest Camilo Torres. Camilo Torres, a friend from Garcia Marquez's years in college, became a priest; baptized Garcia Marquez's first son, Gonzalo; and in the 1960s became a popular figure for turning priesthood into a form of rebellion (Liberation Theology). He was killed by the Colombian armed forces in 1966. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, now in his seventies, enjoys wealth and fame. Fame, he says, is great - but after all the fanfare associated with being famous is over, he adds humorously, the only real benefit is not having to stand in line.

In August 1995, invited by the American author William Styron to a dinner party at Styron's summer home in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, Garcia Marquez met U.S. President Bill Clinton. At the dinner party, where Mexican novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and critic Carlos Fuentes was also a guest, Garcia Marquez reminded President Clinton that during his first campaign for the presidency, Clinton had said that his favorite book was One Hundred Years of Solitude, perhaps in an effort to win the Hispanic vote.

Clinton replied that his comment regarding One Hundred Years of Solitude was a sincere one and recited the opening sentence: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” The dinner started at eight and ended around midnight. Garcia Marquez wrote an article about it for the Argentine newspaper Clarin Digital (available through the Internet).

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born on March 6, 1928, in Aracataca, Colombia. "Aracataca is a small town in the foothills of a spur of the Andes, near the Atlantic coast. The town has a small railroad station, a river with clear water and large white boulders, a street of Turks, and a few African Colombians" (Janes 1991, 4). However, Colombia is larger "than Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana taken together" (McNerney 3). The town of Aracataca, where Garcia Marquez was born, is hardly visible on most maps.

However, it is now a common name for scholars and students of Spanish American letters. Aracataca is the geographical reference Garcia Marquez uses to create the imaginary Macondo. Known the world over as Gabriel Garcia Marquez but to his family and friends as Gabo or Gabito, Garcia Marquez was baptized Gabriel Jose. He was the firstborn of twelve children, of whom seven were boys. He was named after his father, Gabriel Eligio Garcia.

Garcia Marquez's first publications were all short stories, which appeared from 1947 to 1952 in the newspapers El Espectador of Bogota and El Heraldo (The Herald) of Barranquilla. During those years he published a total of fifteen short stories.