person1950s-2014

Gabriel García Márquez

Disciplines:

Summary

Colombian novelist who wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude — the novel that defined magical realism and changed the course of world literature.

Core Contribution

One Hundred Years of Solitude: the Buendía family through six generations, in a village where the miraculous and the mundane are indistinguishable — the founding text of magical realism and the Latin American Boom. Love in the Time of Cholera: love deferred fifty years. The General in His Labyrinth: Simón Bolívar's last journey. Nobel Prize in Literature (1982).

Key Spikes & Highlights

One Hundred Years of Solitude was rejected by the first publisher he sent it to — he had mortgaged the family typewriter and other household items to buy the postage to send the manuscript.
Had a decades-long friendship with Fidel Castro — a relationship that damaged his reputation with liberal intellectuals who felt he gave cover to the Cuban regime.

Notable Works & Achievements

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Love in the Time of Cholera

The Autumn of the Patriarch

No One Writes to the Colonel

Historical Influences

William Faulkner Virginia Woolf Franz Kafka

Intellectual Lineage

Latin American Modernism Magical Realism

Contemporaries & Peers

Jorge Luis Borges Mario Vargas Llosa

Minds Influenced

Salman Rushdie Toni Morrison Isabel Allende

Intellectual Posterity

Magical Realism Latin American Literature World Literature

Discussing