GARCA MRQUEZ, GABRIEL

born March 6, 1928, Aracataca, Colom. Garca Mrquez, 1982. Latin-American author of novels and short stories, a central figure in the so-called magic realism movement in Latin-American literature. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. Although born into poverty, Garca Mrquez studied law and journalism at the National University of Colombia in Bogot and at the University of Cartagena. He began his career as a journalist in 1948, working in Cartagena, Barranquilla, and Bogot. In the late 1950s Garca Mrquez was a foreign correspondent for the Bogot daily El Espectador in Rome and Paris, returning to Colombia and then to Caracas as a journalist in 1958. From 1959 to 1961 he worked for the Cuban news agency La Prensa in Colombia, Havana, and New York City, and in the 1960s he worked as a screenwriter, journalist, and publicist in Mexico City. He moved to Barcelona in 1973 and in the later 1970s returned to Mexico. In the early 1980s, periodic restrictions on his travel in his native Colombia and in the United States were attributed to his avowed left-wing political views. Garca Mrquez began writing short stories in the late 1940s. His first major publication was La hojarasca (1955; Leafstorm and Other Stories). In this story first appears the fictional Colombian village of Macondothe setting of much of his later workand the combination of realism and fantasy characteristic of his style. El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (1961), which first appeared in the Colombian magazine Mito in 1958, relates the story of an aged war veteran whose service remains unrecognized by the country for which he fought. It was translated together with a collection of short stories, Los funerales de la Mam Grande (1962), under the title No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories (1968). During this period Garca Mrquez also published La mala hora (1962; In Evil Hour), a story of political repression in Macondo. It was during his first stay in Mexico that Garca Mrquez wrote his best-known novel, Cien aos de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude), which recounts the history of Macondo and its founders, the Buenda family. It is also a history of Colombia and, on its highest level, a presentation of the myth and legend of human experience. The dense, convoluted style of this and other works recalls that of the American novelist William Faulkner. With Mario Vargas Llosa, Garca Mrquez produced a volume of literary criticism, La novela en America Latina (1968). An episode in Cien aos gave rise to the collection of short stories titled La increble y triste historia de la candida Erndira y de su abuela deselmada (1972; Innocent Erndira and Other Stories). Another series of stories was published as Ojos de perro azul (1972; Eyes of a Blue Dog). He later wrote El otoo del patriarca (1975; The Autumn of the Patriarch), a satire on Latin-American military dictators; and Crnica de una muerte anunciada (1981; Chronicle of a Death Foretold), which examines the events surrounding a murder for honour in a Latin-American town. Garca Mrquez's subsequent novels were El amor en los tiempos del clera (1985; Love in the Time of Cholera), a meditation on fidelity in romantic love; and El general en su laberinto (1989; The General in His Labyrinth), a fictional account of the Latin-American liberator Simn Bolvar during the last months of his life. In the mid-1990s Garca Mrquez again turned his hand to journalism, examining the Colombian drug world in the nonfiction Noticia de un secuestro (1996; News of a Kidnapping).