Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014) was born in Aracataca, Colombia, on March 6, 1927. He was the son of Gabriel Elísio García and Luisa Santiaga Márquez. Gabriel studied at the Liceo Nacional de Zipaquirá in Barranquilla.
At 17, he decided to become a writer, claiming that after reading Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, he discovered that the German told stories in the same way as his grandmother. In 1947, he moved to Bogotá to study Law and Political Science at the National University of Colombia, but he did not complete the course. That same year, he published his first short story “The Third Resignation” in the newspaper El Espectador.
In 1948, Gabriel García Márquez went to Cartagena where he began working as a journalist at El Universal. In 1949 he moved to Barranquilla as a reporter for El Heraldo. In 1954, he started working at El Espectador as a reporter and critic. In 1955, he published his first novel “The Flight” (The Burial of the Devil).
In 1958, he went to Europe as a correspondent for El Espectador. In 1962, he moved to New York as a correspondent. His affiliation with the Communist Party, his criticisms of Cuban exiles, and his friendship with Fidel Castro led him to be pursued by the CIA, and he was unable to obtain his residency visa in the country.
Still in 1962, Gabriel García Márquez won the Esso Prize for Novel in Colombia with the novel “The Poison of Dawn” (1962). Accused of collaborating with the Colombian guerrilla, he exiled himself in Mexico, where he wrote what would become his most popular novel and masterpiece, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1967), an epic about a fictional family, the Buendías, in the imaginary town of Macondo. In it, the writer blends personal memories with extraordinary events.
The novel was written during a time of great suffering,
when his family was accumulating debts. To send the typed original to Argentina, the writer had to pawn even his electric heater. But the reward came in 1972 when he received the Rómulo Gallegos Latin American Novel Prize for the work. In 1971, he returned to the United States to receive an honorary doctorate from Columbia University. In 1982, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his body of work. In 1981, he received the Medal of the French Legislation.
Gabriel García Márquez was so passionate about cinema that he considered becoming a filmmaker. In addition to his vast literary production of novels, short stories, and journalistic works, he was also a screenwriter for several films. He went to Rome to study how films were made. He was at the forefront of two institutions dedicated to cinema, the Foundation of New Latin American Cinema, of which he was president, and the International School of Cinema and TV in San Antonio de Los Baños, both in Cuba. Faithful to Communism and an ally of the Cubans, he created a cinema course in Cuba that some Brazilian filmmakers attended.
Gabriel García Márquez passed away in Mexico City, Mexico, on April 17, 2014.
Source: www.ebiografia.com, by Dilva Frazão