Marquez’s Departure and his Legacy

Gabriel José García Márquez, widely known and referred to as “Gabo,” was born in Aracataca, Colombia, on March 6, 1927. He was the eldest of 11 children to Gabriel Eligio García and Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán de García, though he was raised through his childhood years by his maternal grandparents, Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía and Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes de Márquez. He graduated from the National College for Boys in Zipaquirá, a small colonial city outside of Bogotá, in 1946 and then enrolled at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá to study law before transferring to the University of Cartagena.

García Márquez eventually abandoned his law studies to become a journalist and a writer. He wrote for several Colombian newspapers in the early 1950s including El Universal, El Heraldo, and El Espectador, and his first novel, La hojarasca (The Leaf Storm), was published in 1955. From 1955 to 1957, he lived abroad in Europe working as a foreign correspondent, then as a freelance journalist based in Paris. He also wrote two novels during that time, published several years later as El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (No One Writes to the Colonel) (1961), and La mala hora (In Evil Hour) (1962).

Soon after his return to Latin America in 1957, García Márquez married Mercedes Barcha Pardo whom he had proposed to before leaving Colombia for Europe. They were married on March 21, 1958. They had two sons, Rodrigo, born in 1959, and Gonzalo, born in 1962.

Throughout the early 1960s, García Márquez continued to work in journalism, including for the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina in Cuba and New York, and then writing for publishers and advertising agencies in Mexico City. He published what would become his most successful and well-known work Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) in 1967. This marked a life-changing time for him as he became primarily known for his fiction rather than for his journalism, and he achieved worldwide recognition as a gifted storyteller. His success as a writer also established him as a member of what became known as the “Latin American Literary Boom,” along with Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa. The success of One Hundred Years of Solitude would also contribute to his 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Following the 1960s, García Márquez continued to produce highly regarded works of fiction, including El otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch) (1975), Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Chronicle of a Death Foretold) (1981), El amor en los tiempos del cólera(Love in the Time of Cholera) (1985), El general en su laberinto (The General in His Labyrinth) (1989), and Del amor y otros demonios (Of Love and Other Demons) (1994). He also continued to produce nonfiction works, including La aventura de Miguel Littín, clandestino en Chile (Clandestine in Chile: The adventures of Miguel Littín) (1986) and Noticia de un secuestro (News of a kidnapping) (1996).

In addition to his writing, García Márquez involved himself with politics in Latin America and was a strong supporter of Fidel Castro of Cuba. He was consequently denied a visa to travel to the United States, but the travel ban was lifted by President Bill Clinton when he came into office.

In 1999, García Márquez was diagnosed with lymphoma and underwent treatment in Los Angeles after which the illness went into remission. The event prompted him to work on his memoirs, and the first volume of a projected three, Vivir para contarla (Living to Tell the Tale), was published in 2002. His last work of fiction, Memoria de mis putas tristes(Memories of My Melancholy Whores), was published in 2004. The remaining volumes of his memoir, as well as a novel, En agosto nos vemos, were never completed.

García Márquez died of pneumonia on April 17, 2014 in Mexico City, Mexico. He was 87 years old.