Early Years
Gabriel Márquez was born on March 6, 1927 in Aracataca, Colombia. He spent his childhood at his maternal grandfather's house. My grandfather is a respected retired military officer who once served as a colonel. He is stubborn, kind-hearted and has radical ideas. Grandma is knowledgeable about ancient times and the present, and has a wealth of myths, legends and ghost stories. Marquez began reading "One Thousand and One Nights" at the age of 7, and received the influence of folk literature and culture from his grandmother. In the spiritual world of Marquez during his childhood, his hometown was a strange world full of ghosts and humans. Later, this became an important source of his creation.
In 1940, Marquez moved to the capital, Bogotá. In 1947, he entered the University of Bogota to study law and began literary creation. During his college years, Marquez devoured the poetry of the Spanish Golden Age, which set the stage for his future work. laid a solid foundation for literary creation.
Dropped out of school in 1948 due to the Colombian Civil War. Soon he entered the newspaper world and served as a reporter for the "Observer". In 1955, he was forced to leave Colombia because of a serial article exposing a shipwreck that was glorified by the government. He worked as a European correspondent for the "Observer". Soon the newspaper was closed down by the Colombian government, so he was trapped in Europe. In the same year, he published his first novel "Dead Branches and Leaves". In 1958, Marquez married his long-time lover Mercede, and in 1959, Marquez worked for the Cuban news agency "Latina" in Bogota, Cuba and New York. In 1960, he served as a reporter for the Cuban Latin News Agency. [2] In 1959, he was invited to participate in the victory celebration of the Cuban Revolution and worked in the Latin News Agency led by Che Guevara.
The glorious period
From 1961 to 1967, García Márquez’s wife Mercedes and two sons Rodrigo and Gonzello mainly lived in Mexico , where he worked as a journalist, public relations agent, wrote for films, and continued to write novels. After "One Hundred Years of Solitude" was published in 1967, it was immediately praised by critics as a masterpiece. It was translated into many languages, won him various prizes, and allowed Marquez to devote himself to writing. In 1972, another extraordinary collection of his short stories, "An Incredibly Tragic Story - The Innocent Erendira and the Cruel Grandmother" was published. In 1975, he published "The Decline of the Patriarch", a novel about a dictator. It took Marquez a long time to finish it. In the same year, he held a literary strike to protest the Chilean coup and put his writing on hold for five years.
After 1975, Marquez lived most of his life in Mexico City, although the family also had residences in Paris and Bogotá. He was involved in many aspects of journalism and made many public political statements. He is an authentic leftist and has a good personal relationship with Cuba's Fidel Castro; but he often reminds interviewers that he has never been a Communist. He insisted that Latinos should have the freedom to find solutions to their own problems. In 1982, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature and served as chairman of the French Spanish-speaking Cultural Exchange Committee. In the same year, there was an earthquake in Colombia and he returned to his home country. In 1985, "Love in the Time of Cholera" was published and was called "an old-fashioned happy love story" by García Márquez. In 1986, the first edition of his reportage "The Adventures of Riding in Chile" was publicly destroyed by the Chilean government in Santiago, but this incident ensured the bestsellers of subsequent editions. The novel describes the experience of a famous film director in exile abroad who secretly returned to his native Chile to shoot a documentary about the lives of the people under the Pinochet government. In 1990, Marquez and his agent Carmen visited Beijing and Shanghai. The pirated books that could be seen everywhere annoyed Marquez. After this trip, Marquez made harsh words and refused to authorize China to publish his works, including "One Hundred Years of Solitude" for 150 years after his death. He was diagnosed with lymphoma in 1999. Since then, his literary output has dropped sharply. In January 2006, he announced that he would cease writing. The Marquez family has a genetic history of Alzheimer's disease. After suffering from lymphoma, Marquez received chemotherapy to fight cancer, which resulted in the loss of a large number of neurons in the brain, which accelerated his development of Alzheimer's disease. It is reported that Marquez is now suffering from Alzheimer's disease and may no longer be able to engage in creative activities in the future.
Death news
On April 18, 2014, according to Agence France-Presse, Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature, He died in Mexico City in the early morning of the 18th Beijing time at the age of 87.