Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014) was an author. He is one of the best-known Latin American authors.

Life[]

Born in the small Colombian town of Aracataca in March of 1927, Gabriel's father became a pharmacist shortly after his birth and left his son behind with his grandparents in Aracataca while he left with Gabriel's mother for the port city of Barranquilla. Gabriel was raised by his grandparents for several years before his father returned once his grandfather had died and moved the family to Barranquilla and then to the town of Sucre.

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Writing style[]

Márquez is one of the best-known authors of magical realism, with most (if not all) of his works being within this genre. Most of Márquez's works are set in his native country of Colombia.

Connections to other authors[]

The critic John Leonard said of Márquez's works, "It is the genius of García Márquez that fatalism and possibility somehow coexist, that dreams redeem, that there is laughter even in death."

In reviewing One Hundred Years of Solitude, William Kennedy said: "Mr. García Márquez has done nothing less than to create in the reader a sense of all that is profound, meaningful, and meaningless in life."

In reviewing Love in the Time of Cholera, Thomas Pynchon said: "The Garcimarquesian voice we have come to recognize from the other fiction has matured, found and developed new resources, been brought to a level where it can at once be classical and familiar, opalescent and pure, able to praise and curse, laugh and cry, fabulate and sing and when called upon, take off and soar." Anne Tyler said, "The greatest luxury, as in all of García Márquez's books, is the eerie, entirely convincing suspension of the laws of reality." The reviewer Michio Kakutani said "Mr. García Márquez displays a wise benevolence, an ability to see both the tragedy and humor of their situations."

Notable works[]

Novels and novellas[]

Leaf Storm - a novella set within Macondo
No One Writes to the Colonel - a novella about a retired colonel
In Evil Hour - about a Colombian town's shameful secret coming to life
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel's most well-known work, on the founding of a Colombian town known as Macondo
The Autumn of the Patriarch - a dictator novel, about a Caribbean tyrant
Chronicle of a Death Foretold - a novella about a murder
Love in the Time of Cholera - about a man trying to rekindle an old love
The General in His Labyrinth - about the end of Simón Bolívar's life
Of Love and Other Demons - about a young girl bitten by a rabid dog
Memories of My Melancholy Whores - a novella about an old man finding companionship in a young "lady of ill repute"
Until August - a posthumous novel about a woman taking August trips to an island

Short story collections[]

Collected Stories
- Eyes of a Blue Dog
  - The Third Resignation
  - Eyes of a Blue Dog
  - Eva Is Inside Her Cat
  - Bitterness for Three Sleepwalkers
  - Dialogue with the Mirror
  - Eyes of a Blue Dog
  - The Woman Who Came at Six O'Clock
  - Nabo: The Black Man Who Made the Angels Wait
  - Someone Has Been Disarranging These Roses
  - The Night of the Curlews
  - Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo
- Big Mama's Funeral
  - Tuesday Siesta
  - One of These Days
  - There Are No Thieves in This Town
  - Balthazar's Marvellous Afternoon
  - Montiel's Widow
  - One Day After Saturday
  - Artificial Roses
  - Big Mama's Funeral
- The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother
  - A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
  - The Sea of Lost Time
  - The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World
  - Death Constant Beyond Love
  - The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship
  - Blacamán the Good, Vendor of Miracles
  - The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother
Strange Pilgrims
- Bon Voyage, Mr. President
- The Saint
- The Airplane of the Sleeping Beauty
- I Sell My Dreams
- I Only Came to Use the Phone
- The Ghosts of August
- María dos Prazeres
- Seventeen Poisoned Englishmen
- Tramontana
- Miss Forbes's Summer of Happiness
- Light is Like Water
- The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow

Nonfiction[]

The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor - a book about a sailor lost at sea
The Solitude of Latin America - the author's Nobel Prize acceptance speech
The Fragrance of Guava (with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza) - conversations with the other author
Clandestine in Chile - a book about the filmmaker Miguel Littin's return to his home after his exile
Changing the History of Africa (with David Deutschmann) - a book about Angola and Namibia
News of a Kidnapping - a book about kidnappings performed by the Medellín Cartel
A Country for Children - an essay about Colombia
Living to Tell the Tale - an autobiography
The Scandal of the Century - a selection of journalistic writings

Gabriel García Márquez

Contents