García Márquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia, on March 6, 1928, and lived the first eight years of his life with his maternal grandparents. After the death of his grandfather, a colonel, he moved to a river port town with his parents, and in 1940 he entered a high school near Bogotá on a scholarship. He entered law school at the University of Bogotá in 1947, but after the university closed in the following year due to civil war, he transferred to the University of Cartagena in northern Colombia.

By this time García Márquez had begun writing journalism and fiction, and in 1950, the same year he wrote "Eyes of a Blue Dog," he dropped out of law school to work for various newspapers. He wrote for Bogotá's prominent periodical, the Espectador, until it was shut down by the...