Gabriel García Márquez, the world renowned Colombian novelist of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” was born March 6, 1927. He would've been 90 years old today. He passed away April 17, 2014, at age 87 after a 12-year battle with lymphatic cancer. Prior to his decease, he was admitted to the hospital in stable but fragile health. Márquez was suffering from pneumonia, an infection and dehydration at the time of his death, according to Colombia's President Juan Manuel Santos. Despite the tragic loss of Márquez and his ailing health in later years, the author had a significant impact on the world of both literature and journalism.
Here are five things to know about him:
1) García Márquez, who was affectionately known throughout Latin America as “Gabo” was born on March 6, 1927 in Aracataca, Columbia to his parents Gabriel Eligio García and Luisa Santiaga Márquez. Quickly after his birth, his parents moved to Barranquilla, leaving their young son with his grandparents. Márquez’s grandparents had a huge effect on him. His political and ideological views were shaped by his grandfather. His grandfather was a retired colonel who fought in the 1,000-Day War. His tales of war and honor, provided Márquez with the foundation for his novels. "I have often been told by the family that I started recounting things, stories and so on, almost since I was born," García Márquez once told an interviewer. "Ever since I could speak." However, his grandmother Doña Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, influenced him greatly, most notably with her straight-faced style, which influenced his most popular novel, “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
2) He began his professional writing career as a journalist while studying law at the National University of Colombia. Although Márquez published his first piece of fiction in 1947, in the newspaper “El Espectador,” the teen was prompted to mail in his story after the newspaper’s literary editor wrote that "Colombia's younger generation has nothing to offer in the way of good literature anymore."
3) For seven years, Gabriel García Márquez set to work on his first novella, “Leaf Storm” after being influenced by writers such as William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. “Leaf Storm” was finally published in 1955, then “One Hundred Years of Solitude” followed in 1967, which is his best known work. Márquez continued to write throughout his life, publishing such works as “Autumn of the Patriarch” in 1975 and “Love in the Time of Cholera” in 1985.
4) Márquez received both widespread critical acclaim and commercial success in his lifetime, something that few writers experience. In addition to his literary popularity, Márquez is credited with creating the literary style of “magical realism,” which incorporates the fantastical and magical element in conjunction with everyday life. However this accreditation was not the author’s only accolade.
5) On Dec. 8, 1982, Márquez received the Nobel Prize in Literature "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." Márquez was the first Colombian and the fourth Latin American to win the prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature. In his acceptance speech, which was titled “The Solitude of Latin America.” the writer addressed such issues such as European colonialism, the deterritorialization of Latin America and specifically touched upon countries that have been affected negatively by foreign policy.
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