Gabriel
García Márquez, nicknamed "Gabo" by his fans and followers, was born
in 1927 in the town of Aracataca in the municipality of the department of
Magdalena, near the Colombian Atlantic coast. His parents, Gabriel Eligio
García and Luisa Santiaga Márquez, were two lovers fighting for a forbidden
love. Gabo's maternal grandfather was Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía,
who forbade his daughter to marry her lover because of her family's
socioeconomic situation.
Despite
the obstacles, and in a way that defines the love of yesteryear, Gabriel Eligio
manages to conquer them with love letters, telegrams, and music outside his
window. The two marry, Gabo is born, and the couple quickly moves to
Barranquilla, leaving him in the care of Colonel Márquez.
His
maternal grandmother, Tranquilina, was also a fan of reading fiction and taught
him many different stories that later became part of his inspiration. Marquez
cites her as his greatest literary influence. The town where he grew up,
Aracataca, is believed to be the inspiration for Macondo, the fictional town
where a multitude of the author's stories take place and is taught in his first
book that broke international barriers, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
He
fell in love at the age of thirteen and had to conquer the student Mercedes
Barcha, with whom he proved himself at the end of his studies in 1958. A year
later he had his first son Rodrigo and two years later he moved to New York to
work as a correspondent for a Latin news newspaper.
By
then he had already written his first three novels, La hojarasca in 1955, El
coronel no tiene quien le escriba in 1961 and La mala hora in 1962. It was not
until five years later that García Márquez wrote his fourth novel, which
changed his life. By then Gabo was already a well-traveled man and decided to
live with his wife and children permanently in Mexico City. It was there that
he wrote and published One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967.
In the
first week it sold 8,000 copies. Every week after that, the book sold one
edition every week, selling approximately 30 million copies to date (the same
amount as The Diary of Anne Frank) and was converted into 24 languages,
nominating it for four international awards. It received the Nobel Prize for
literature in 1982.
The
economic success of the work gave free rein to Márquez's imagination, who went
on to write several classics, such as Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), Of
Love and Other Demons (1994) and Memory of My Sad Whores (2004), his latest
novel. In 1999, in Mexico City, he was diagnosed with cancer, which put his
health at risk and he stopped writing, finally dying in 2014. His books have resonated in the minds of
millions of readers, who still pay tribute to one of the greatest minds of
international literature of the twentieth century.