Media & Arts

Gabriel García Márquez

Pawned the household to finish the novel; couldn't afford to mail the full manuscript to the publisher.

Born: 1927 · Aracataca, Colombia
Roots: Colombian, from the Caribbean coast
Family: Working class; Telegraph-operator father; raised for eight years by his grandparents — a war-veteran colonel and a grandmother full of ghost stories.
Education: Law at the National University of Colombia (abandoned for journalism)
Started with: A grandmother's stories; Her matter-of-fact way with the supernatural set the voice of his fiction.
Affiliations & societies: None documented.; Information only — claims like these are often unverifiable and may be wrong.

The pathway

1948 · age 21
Journalism
Drops law during the Bogotazo upheaval; writes for coastal papers with the Barranquilla Group.
1955 · age 28
Leaf Storm
His first novel appears after years of publisher rejections.
1956 · age 29
Broke in Paris
His newspaper is closed by the dictatorship while he is its correspondent; he redeems bottles for centimes.
1965 · age 38
Turns the car around
The opening of One Hundred Years of Solitude arrives on the road to Acapulco; he writes for eighteen months while his wife pawns household goods.
1967 · age 40
One Hundred Years of Solitude
They can only afford postage for half the manuscript; the printing sells out in weeks. Over 50 million copies follow.
1982 · age 55
Nobel Prize in Literature

Sources

Compiled from these references and contemporaneous press reporting. Figures are approximate; verify before relying on them.