100+Years+and+Gabriel+Garcia+Marquez

__100 Years and Gabriel Garcia Marquez__

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born March 6, 1928 in Aracataca, Colombia. He was the oldest of twelve children who was sent to live with his maternal grandparents. It is said that an incident on December 6, in a Cienaga train station, about 3,000 banana workers were shot and killed by troops from Antioquia, had a profound effect on his writting. When he was just eight years old, Gabriel's grandparents retired so he was sent to live with his parents and siblings in Sucre. Marquez won scholarships to complete his secondary education at Colegio Nacional, where he discovered literature. In 1946, Marquez entered law school at National University of Bogota. There he published his first short stories in leading liberal newspapers. On April 9, 1948, the assassination of the Liberal presidential canidate led to three days of riots. One of the buildings that was burned was Marquez's, his manuscripts were destroyed along with his living quarters. In 1950, he abandoned his legal studies and began writing columns and stories for //El Heraldo//, which is a Liberal newspaper. Marquez's first novel, Leaf Storm, was published by a small Bogota press in 1955. Within the same year he also began attending meetings of the Colombian Communist Party and traveling to Europe as a foreign correspondent. Marquez wrote his second novel, //In Evil Hour//, and started working on short stories, //No One Writes To The Colonel//. In 1958 Marquez went to Barranquilla to marry Mercedes BArcha, his childhood sweetheart. They both lived together in Caracas while he continued to worj as a journalist and wrote fiction. January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro's Guerilla revolution triumphed. This revolution impacted Marquez and was a crucial importance to contemporary Latin American history. On August 24, his first born child Rodrigo was born. In 1961 Marquez won the Esso Lirerary Prize in Colombia for In Evil Hour. For Four years Marquez wrote no new fiction and was subject to derision for his writer's block. In 1970 the book //One Hundred Years of Solitude// was published in English and immediately hailed as a classic. The book won many prizes in various countries. //One Hundred Years of Solitude// is accepted as Marquez's literary masterpiece. It became known as the turning-point between modernism and postmodernism.
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