Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-2014)

1. A Colombian novelist,screenwriter and journalist also known as Gabo or Gabito throughout Latin America.
2. Left school for a career in journalism. He was a “committed leftist” and believed in socialism. His political view was inspired by his grandfather Colonel.
3. Associated with Literary Movements like Latin American Boom and Magic Realism.
4. One of the major 20th Century novelists in the Spanish language.
5. Neustadt International Prize for Literature 1972 winner along with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.
6. Some of his works are set in the fictional village of Macondo, mainly inspired by his birthplace Aracataca, and his works frequently deal with solitude.
7. Marquez was one of the original founders of QAP, a Colombian newscast aired between January 2, 1992 to December 1997

Works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor:

1. His last domestically written political satire was a series of 14 news articles for EL Espectador.
2. In this series he narrated how a Colombian Navy vessel’s shipwreck “occurred because that boat contained a badly stowed cargo of contraband goods that broke loose on the deck”
3. This story was written and compiled on the basis of interviews of a surviving young sailor.

Left Storm (La Hojarasca) (1955)

1. His first novella and it took seven years for him to find a publisher until finally in 1955 it got published.
2. This was the favorite writing of Marquez as he took the work as spontaneous and most sincere.
3. Ths plot of the novel is a half an hour story that takes place in a single room on Wednesday 12 September 1928.
4. The story is of an old Colonel (biographical with his own grandfather) who labors to bury an unpopular French doctor with Christian rituals.
5. The daughter, Isabel and Colonel’s grandson only support him, the child’s first encounter of death, Stream of Consciousness, female roles are prominent themes of the novel.

In Evil Hour (La Mala Hora) (1962)

1. His second novel was originally titled Este Pueblo de Mierda (This Town of Shit or This Shitty Town).
2. Some of the Character of the story reappears in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.

One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)

1. From his teen age he had to write a story on his grandfather’s house where he grew up, while driving his car with family in Acapulco, he got the idea and turned the car back home to start writing the story. Then sold the car to finance his family during this writing. He wrote every day for 18 months and his family went through severe financial crisis, his wife had to ask for food on credit from their butcher and baker, nine month’s rent was due.
2. During this time of 18 months of writing, Marquez discussed the progress and development of the novel with a couple Alvaro Mutis and Maria Luisa Ellio and Jomi Garcia Ascot.
3. After getting published in 1967, the book sold 50 million copies.
4. The book was dedicated to Para (to) Jomi Garcia Ascot y Maria Luisa Elio”.
5. The novel led him to win the Nobel Prize as well as the Romulo Gallegos Prize in 1972.
6. The story chronicles several generations in the family of Buendia from the time they found the fictional South American Village of Macondo. The story is about their trials and tribunals, incest, birth and death.
7. The story of Macondo is frequently cited by critics to represent the rural towns throughout Latin America or at least Marquez’s native Aracataca, Carribean region of Colombia.
8. William Kennedy has called the nove, “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that shuld be required reading for the entire human race.”

The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother (1972)

1. Original Spanish: La increible y triste historia de la candida Erendira y de su abuela desalmada.
2. The story depicts the dream of a 14 years old Mulatto girl, Erendira who lives with her grandmother, wanting freedom but can not escape her grandmother.
3. Erendila and her grandmother appeared in One Hundred Year of Solitude also.
4. The girl accidentally sets fire on the house and her grandmother forces her to repay the debt by prostituting her on the road as they became vagrants.
5. Men line up to enjoy her body.
6. With the help of ther gullible lover Ulises, she manages to escape only when he murdered her grandmother.
7. Erendila ran leaving her lover and the dead body of the grandmother in the tent.

Autumn of the Patriarch (1975)

1. A Dictator Novel: a genre of Latin american literature that challenges the role of the dictator in Latin American Society. This genre of novel is associated with American Bloom of the 1960s and 1970s, but it has its roots in the 19th century non-fictional work Facundo (1845) by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento.
2. It is a dictator novel, when Marquez saw the fight of Venezuelan dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez, he was inspired to write the novel. He said “It was the first time we had seen a dictator fall in Latin America.”
3. He started writing the novel in 1968 and finished it in 1971, the novel was published in 1975 in Spain.
4. According to Marquez, the novel is a “poem on the solitude of power” as it follows the life of an eternal dictator known as General. The novel is set in the Caribbean region.
5. After the publication of the novel Marquez and his family moved to Mexico City.

Chronicle of Death Foretold (1981)

Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)

Changing the History of Africa (1991)

1. In 1991 he published Changing the History of Africa, the work that admired the Cuban activities in the Angolan Civil War and South African Border War.

News of a Kidnapping (1996)

Living to the Tale and Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2002)