The Short Stories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Short Stories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Short story writer. Novelist. Journalist. Political activist. Nobel Prize winner. Most beloved of 20th century Latin American authors, Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born on March 6, 1928, in the small coastal town of Aracataca, Colombia. He published his first story, "The Third Resignation," in 1947 and began studying law and journalism. His first novel, Leafstorm, was published in 1955, the same year the Colombian government shut down his employer, the newspaper El Espectador. In 1958, after 14 years of engagement, he married Mercedes Burcha and began working for the Caracas newspaper, El Momento. During the Cuban Revolution in 1959, he worked for Cuba’s Prensa Latina in Bogota, Cuba, and New York. He published No One Writes to the Colonel in 1961 and was awarded the Colombian National Novel Prize for In Evil Hour. After two years of seclusion he published his most famed novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude; in 1970, it was published in English and named one of Time’s ten best books of the year. Always active in politics, Garcia Marquez founded the leftist magazine, Alternativa, in Bogota. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. Other important novels in Garcia Marquez’s large body of work include Love in the Time of Cholera, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Of Love and Other Demons, and The General in His Labyrinth, about Simon Bolivar. His most recent work, News of a Kidnapping, published in 1996, is a piece of journalistic nonfiction. Prolific and versatile, Garcia Marquez has endured for half a century and earned himself an honored place in world literature.

Though not as well known as his novels, his short stories make for particularly fascinating reading. His first...

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...entence conjures imagery of the Garden of Eden, and implies that since that time, man has lived in a meaningless, disoriented fog of self-absorption.

Though perhaps not as accomplished as his fine novels, the early short stories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez accurately embody the atmosphere of the 20th century. His Kafkaesqe visions deftly blur the line between the real and the unreal, the physical and the imaginary. The psychological and philosophical torment of his characters reverberates throughout the work of many other modern authors, and these stories serve as an auspicious beginning to a remarkable career in world literature.

Works Cited

Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. "Eva Is Inside Her Cat." Collected Stories. Cambridge: Harper & Row, 1984. 3-12.

Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. "The Third Resignation." Collected Stories. Cambridge: Harper & Row, 1984. 23-34.