World-renowned, Nobel Prize-winning author, García Márquez is especially popular in his native Latin America, where he is affectionately referred to as "Gabito." The author has done much to illuminate the trials and tribulations of Columbian life, through both his fiction and journalism. García Márquez was born on March 6, 1928, in Aracataca, Colombia. The son of a telegraph operator, the author spent the first years of his life with his maternal grandparents, moving into his parents' house after the death of his grandfather.

The author earned a scholarship to a high school near Bogotá, and seven years later, in 1947, he enrolled in law school at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. He attended school there until the political upheaval of la Violencia caused the university to close the next year, at which point the author transferred to the Universidad de...