Born in 1928 in Aracataca, Colombia, Gabriel García Márquez began publishing short stories in the 1940s, after moving to Bogotá to study law. An indifferent student, García Márquez began working as a journalist for various newspapers, establishing friendships with other young writers, and, eventually, publishing his first novel, La hojarasca (Leaf Storm) in 1955. By 1955 he was one of the most renowned newspapermen in Colombia. He moved the next year to Paris, France, as the European correspondent for El Espectador, the more liberal of the nation’s two major newspapers. When the newspaper shut down, García Márquez stayed in Paris to write fiction full-time, achieving moderate success with his early short stories and novels. In 1964 García Márquez had a sudden inspiration, and was able to imagine “word by word” the text of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the novel he’d been trying to get out since 1942 (García Márquez in Bell-Villada, p. 56). He was by now living in Mexico, where he wrote the novel obsessively, accumulating thousands of dollars of debt in order to support his family and continue his work. The phenomenal success of One Hundred Years of Solitude took the writer by surprise; he suddenly found himself in the limelight, an uncomfortable but useful position for him in that he was able to use this global success to benefit the left-wing causes he fervently supported.
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