Gabriel García Márquez: life, works, and literary influence

Gabriel Garcia-Marquez was born on March 6, 1928 in Aracataca, Colombia. Raised by his grandparents in the remote isolated village, Marquez has become a literary celebration with such books as "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Love in the Time of Cholera," winning the Nobel Prize in literature in 1982 (Gabriel pg). He attended Universidad Nacional in Bogota and studied law at the Universidad de Cartagena. While writing a column for El Universal in college, he became disinterested in law and began studying literature (Gabriel pg). He was honored by the Swedish Academy of Letters "for his novels and short stories in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts" (Gabriel pg).

There is little doubt that Marquez's upbringing had a tremendous effect on his life. His grandfather, former Colonel Nicholas Ricardo Marquez Mejia, helped found the village of Aracataca in northern Colombia (Gabriel pg). Mejia was a Liberal and had openly criticized those responsible for the banana massacres during the War of a Thousand Days and had given a speech about the murders before Congress in 1929 (Gabriel pg). The War of a Thousand Days, 1899-1903 was a Colombian civil war between Liberals, plantation owners and merchants, and Conservatives that resulted in 130,000 deaths and national economic ruin (Thousand pg). Gabriel grew up listening to the history his grandfather had witnessed and participated and his grandmother's folk tales and superstitions (Gabriel pg). This combination of reality and fantasy is certain to have influenced and nourished Gabriel's writing style of magical realism.

In "Serenade," published in the "New Yorker" in 2001, Marquez describes "My mother became a woman in a godforsaken hellhole... spent an uncertain childhood plagued by malarial fevers" (Marquez pg). However, she spent her "ninety-fifth birthday with eleven of her own children, and four of her husband's, and sixty-six grandchildren, seventy-three great-grandchildren, and five great-great-grandchildren" (Marquez pg). "Serenade" recounts his parents' early childhood and courting as remembered from the countless stories of their forbidden love as told to him by both his parents throughout his life. Although, their years were filled with illness, death, war and much suffering, Marquez recalls it as a great and passionate love story (Marquez pg).