Gabriel Jose Garcia Marquez was born on March 6, 1928, in Aracataca, Colombia, a small town in a farming region near the Caribbean coast. His birth came just as this region entered a sudden economic decline after twenty years of relative prosperity. His father, an out-of-work telegraph operator, relocated, leaving young Gabriel to be raised by his grandparents for the first eight years of his life.

These early circumstances are significant, for they seem to have had a profound influence on the mature writer's work. Garcia Marquez has said that he had learned everything important in his life by the time he was eight years old, and that nothing in his writing is purely a product of "fantasy." As a boy, he delighted in his grandfather's storytelling, from which he heard local legends and history; from his grandmother and the other villagers, he absorbed a wealth of traditions...