59 Facts About Gabriel Garcia Marquez

1.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez pursued a self-directed education that resulted in leaving law school for a career in journalism.

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2.

Garcia Marquez started as a journalist and wrote many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best known for his novels, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and Love in the Time of Cholera.

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3.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for popularizing a literary style known as magic realism, which uses magical elements and events in otherwise ordinary and realistic situations.

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4.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born on 6 March 1927 in Aracataca, Colombia, to Gabriel Eligio Garcia and Luisa Santiaga Marquez Iguaran.

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5.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was raised by his maternal grandparents, Dona Tranquilina Iguaran and Colonel Nicolas Ricardo Marquez Mejia.

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6.

Gabriel Eligio Garcia was not the man the Colonel had envisioned winning the heart of his daughter: Gabriel Eligio was a Conservative, and had the reputation of being a womanizer.

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7.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez Eligio wooed Luisa with violin serenades, love poems, countless letters, and even telephone messages after her father sent her away with the intention of separating the young couple.

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8.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's parents tried everything to get rid of the man, but he kept coming back, and it was obvious their daughter was committed to him.

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9.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's grandfather, whom he called "Papalelo", was a Liberal veteran of the Thousand Days War.

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10.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was well known for his refusal to remain silent about the banana massacres that took place the year after Garcia Marquez was born.

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11.

The Colonel, whom Garcia Marquez described as his "umbilical cord with history and reality, " was an excellent storyteller.

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12.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez taught Garcia Marquez lessons from the dictionary, took him to the circus each year, and was the first to introduce his grandson to ice—a "miracle" found at the United Fruit Company store.

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13.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez enjoyed his grandmother's unique way of telling stories.

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14.

Garcia Marquez spent his first years of high school, from 1940, in the Colegio jesuita San Jose, where he published his first poems in the school magazine Juventud.

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15.

Later, thanks to a scholarship given to him by the government, Gabriel Garcia Marquez was sent to study in Bogota, then was relocated to the Liceo Nacional de Zipaquira, a town one hour away from the capital, where he would finish his secondary studies.

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16.

Garcia Marquez transferred to the Universidad de Cartagena and began working as a reporter of El Universal.

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17.

Garcia Marquez began his career as a journalist while studying law at the National University of Colombia.

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18.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez worked with inspirational figures such as Ramon Vinyes, whom Garcia Marquez depicted as an Old Catalan who owns a bookstore in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

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19.

From 1954 to 1955, Garcia Marquez spent time in Bogota and regularly wrote for Bogota's El Espectador.

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20.

In December 1957 Garcia Marquez accepted a position in Caracas with the magazine Momento directed by his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza.

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21.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez arrived in the Venezuelan capital on 23 December 1957, and began working right away at Momento.

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22.

Garcia Marquez witnessed the 1958 Venezuelan coup d'etat, leading to the exile of the president Marcos Perez Jimenez.

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23.

Garcia Marquez was a "committed leftist" throughout his life, adhering to socialist beliefs.

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24.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez maintained a close but "nuanced" friendship with Fidel Castro, praising the achievements of the Cuban Revolution but criticizing aspects of governance and working to "soften [the] roughest edges" of the country.

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25.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote about his experiences for El Independiente, a newspaper that briefly replaced El Espectador during the military government of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla and was later shut down by Colombian authorities.

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26.

Garcia Marquez was one of the original founders of QAP, a Colombian newscast that aired between 1992 and 1997.

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27.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was attracted to the project by the promise of editorial and journalistic independence.

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28.

Garcia Marquez met Mercedes Barcha while she was at school; he was 12 and she was 9.

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29.

Garcia Marquez had always wanted to see the Southern United States because it inspired the writings of William Faulkner.

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30.

Three years later, the couple's second son, Gonzalo Gabriel Garcia Marquez, was born in Mexico.

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31.

In January 2022, it was reported that Garcia Marquez had a daughter, Indira Cato, from an extramarital affair with Mexican writer Susana Cato in the early 1990s.

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32.

From when he was 18, Garcia Marquez had wanted to write a novel based on his grandparents' house where he grew up.

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33.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez turned the car around and the family returned home so he could begin writing.

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34.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez sold his car so his family would have money to live on while he wrote.

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35.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's wife had to ask for food on credit from their butcher and baker as well as nine months of rent on credit from their landlord.

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36.

Garcia Marquez was inspired to write a dictator novel when he witnessed the flight of Venezuelan dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez.

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37.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold, which literary critic Ruben Pelayo called a combination of journalism, realism and detective story, is inspired by a real-life murder that took place in Sucre, Colombia, in 1951, but Garcia Marquez maintained that nothing of the actual events remains beyond the point of departure and the structure.

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38.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold was published in 1981, the year before Garcia Marquez was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.

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39.

In 2002 Garcia Marquez published the memoir Vivir para contarla, the first of a projected three-volume autobiography.

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40.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a film critic, he founded and served as executive director of the Film Institute in Havana, was the head of the Latin American Film Foundation, and wrote several screenplays.

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41.

Garcia Marquez originally wrote his Erendira as a third screenplay.

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42.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel Of Love and Other Demons was adapted and directed by a Costa Rican filmmaker, Hilda Hidalgo, who is a graduate of the Film Institute at Havana where Garcia Marquez would frequently impart screenplay workshops.

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43.

In 1999 Garcia Marquez was misdiagnosed with pneumonia instead of lymphatic cancer.

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44.

The next day other newspapers republished his alleged farewell poem, "La Marioneta, " but shortly afterward Garcia Marquez denied being the author of the poem, which was determined to be the work of a Mexican ventriloquist.

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45.

In May 2008 it was announced that Garcia Marquez was finishing a new "novel of love" that had yet to be given a title, to be published by the end of the year.

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46.

In December 2008 Garcia Marquez told fans at the Guadalajara book fair that writing had worn him out.

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47.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez had infections in his lungs and his urinary tract, and was suffering from dehydration.

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48.

Garcia Marquez died of pneumonia at the age of 87 on 17 April 2014, in Mexico City.

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49.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's death was confirmed by Fernanda Familiar on Twitter, and by his former editor Cristobal Pera.

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50.

Garcia Marquez was cremated at a private family ceremony in Mexico City.

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51.

In February 2015, the heirs of Gabriel Garcia Marquez deposited a legacy of the writer in his Memoriam in the Caja de las Letras of the Instituto Cervantes.

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52.

Garcia Marquez was noted for leaving out seemingly important details and events so the reader is forced into a more participatory role in the story development.

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53.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez uses his home town of Aracataca, Colombia as a cultural, historical and geographical reference to create this imaginary town, but the representation of the village is not limited to this specific area.

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54.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez describes a trip he made with his mother back to Aracataca as a young man:.

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55.

Whether in fiction or nonfiction, in the epic novel or the concentrated story, Gabriel Garcia Marquez is recognized in the words of Carlos Fuentes as "the most popular and perhaps the best writer in Spanish since Cervantes".

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56.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's work has challenged critics of Colombian literature to step out of the conservative criticism that had been dominant before the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

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57.

Garcia Marquez continues to cast a lengthy shadow in Colombia, Latin America, and the United States.

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58.

Garcia Marquez received the Nobel Prize in Literature on 10 December 1982 "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".

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59.

Garcia Marquez was the first Colombian and fourth Latin American to win a Nobel Prize for Literature.

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