Encyclopedia > The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and her Heartless Grandmother
Gabriel García Márquez (born March 6, 1928) is a Colombian novelist, journalist, publisher, and political activist. He has lived mostly in Mexico and Europe; he currently spends most of his time in Mexico City.
García Márquez is often considered the most famous writer of magic realism, and much of his writing has elements strongly associated with the style, but his writing is too diverse to be easily categorized as a whole.
García Márquez got his start as a reporter for the Colombian daily El Espectador, and later worked as a foreign correspondent in Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Caracas, and New York City.
His first major work was The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (Relato de un náufrago), which he wrote as a newspaper series in 1955. The book told the inglorious true story of a shipwreck that had been glorified by the government. This resulted in the beginning of his foreign correspondence, as it was unsafe for him to remain in Colombia. It was later published in 1970 and taken by many to have been a novel.
Several of his works have been classified as both fiction and non-fiction, notably Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Crónica de una muerte anunciada) (1981), which tells the tale of revenge killing in his hometown of Aracataca, and Love in the Time of Cholera (El amor en los tiempos del cólera) (1985), which tells the story of his grandparents' courtship. In addition, many of his works, including those two, take place in the "García Márquez universe", with characters, events, and locations appearing from book to book.
His most famous novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad) (1967; English translation by Gregory Rabassa 1970), has sold more than ten million copies. It depicts the life of an isolated South American village where strange occurrences are portrayed as commonplace; it certainly has elements of the magically real, but it is much more than that, being also a philosophical reflection on the nature of time and isolation, and is also lacking the folkloric content which is a prerequisite of magic realism. Not everything strange and unexplained is folkloric; some of it is simply life.
García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982, with his short stories and novels cited as the basis for the award. [1] (http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1982/)
In 2002, he published the memoir Vivir para contarla, the first volume of a projected three-volume autobiography. The book was a huge bestseller in the Spanish-speaking world. Edith Grossman's English translation, Living to Tell the Tale, was published in November 2003 and has proved to be another bestseller. On September 10, 2004, the Bogotá daily El Tiempo announced a new novel due in October, Memoria de mis putas tristes, a love story that will have a first printing of one million copies.
García Márquez is also noted for his enthusiasm for Fidel Castro and has previously expressed sympathy for some Latin American revolutionary groups, especially during the 60's and 70's.
Bibliography
External link - Gabriel García Márquez pages (http://www.themodernword.com/gabo/)
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