Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez (Spanish pronunciation: [ɡaˈβɾjel ɡaɾˈsia ˈmaɾkes]; born March 6, 1927 is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature, and is the earliest remaining living recipient.1 He pursued a self-directed education that resulted in his leaving law school for a career in journalism. From early on, he showed no inhibitions in his criticism of Colombian and foreign politics. In 1958, he married Mercedes Barcha; they have two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.

He started as a journalist, and has written many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best known for his novels, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). His works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for popularizing a literary style labeled as magic realism, which uses magical elements and events in otherwise ordinary and realistic situations. Some of his works are set in a fictional village called Macondo (the town mainly inspired by his birthplace Aracataca), and most of them express the theme of solitude.

List of works
Novels
* In Evil Hour (1962)
* One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
* The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975)
* Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)
* The General in His Labyrinth (1989)

Novellas
* Leaf Storm (1955)
* No One Writes to the Colonel (1961)
* Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981)
* Of Love and Other Demons (1994)
* Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004)

Short story collections
* A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings (1955)
* La Siesta del Martes (1962)
* Ojos de Perro Azul (Eyes of a Blue Dog) (1974)
* Innocent Eréndira, and Other Stories (1978)
* Collected Stories (1984)
* Strange Pilgrims (1993)

Non-fiction
* The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (1970)
* The Solitude of Latin America (1982)
* The Fragrance of Guava (1982, with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza)
* Clandestine in Chile (1986)
* News of a Kidnapping (1996)
* A Country for Children (1998)
* Living to Tell the Tale (2002)

One Hundred Years of Solitude
is a novel that tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founds the town of Macondo, the metaphoric Colombia. The non-linear story is narrated via different time frames, a technique derived from the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (as in The Garden of Forking Paths)[citation needed].

The widely acclaimed book, considered by many to be the author's masterpiece, was first published in Spanish in 1967, and subsequently has been translated into thirty-seven languages and has sold more than 20 million copies.[1][2] The magical realist style and thematic substance of One Hundred Years of Solitude established it as an important, representative novel of the literary Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s,[3] that was stylistically influenced by Modernism (European and North American), and the Cuban Vanguardia (Vanguard) literary movement.

Love in the Time of Cholera
The main characters of the novel are Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza. She becomes enamoured with him during their youth but is forced to stop meeting him by her father. Eventually she weds Juvenal Urbino at the age of 21 (the "deadline" she had set for herself) because he seemed to offer her security and love. Urbino is a medical doctor devoted to science, modernity, and "order and progress." He is committed to the eradication of cholera and to the promotion of public works. He is a rational man whose life is organized precisely and who values his importance and reputation in society to the utmost. He is a herald of progress and modernization.

Urbino's function in the novel is to provide the counterpoint to Florentino Ariza’s archaic, boldly romantic love. Urbino proves in the end not to have been an entirely faithful husband, confessing one affair to Fermina many years into their marriage. Though the novel seems to suggest that Urbino's love for Fermina was never as spiritually chaste as Florentino Ariza's was, it also complicates Florentino's devotion by cataloging his many trysts and apparently a few, possibly genuine, loves. By the end of the book, Fermina comes to recognize Ariza's wisdom and maturity and their love is allowed to blossom during their old age. For most of their adult lives, however, their communication is limited to occasional public niceties.