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Gabriel GarcIa MArquez[gAbrEel´ gArsE´A mAr´kAs] Pronunciation Key, 1928–, Colombian novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. Widely considered the greatest living Latin American master of narrative, GarcIa MArquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. Reflecting the influence of writers such as Jorges Luis Borges, Miguel Angel Asturias, and Alejo Carpentier, his work focuses on the physical and moral travail of coastal Colombia, but is given universal meaning in his books.
His two masterpieces One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967, tr. 1970), his best-known work, and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985, tr. 1988), present his central themes of violence, solitude, and the overwhelming human need for love. GarcIa MArquez's style marks a high point in Latin American magic realism; it is rich and lucid, mixing reality and fantasy. Among his other works are Leaf Storm and Other Stories (1955, tr. 1972), No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories (1958, tr. 1968), Innocent Erendira and Other Stories (1972, tr. 1978), The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975, tr. 1976), The General in His Labyrinth (1989, tr. 1990), and Of Love and Other Demons (1994, tr. 1995). His nonfiction work, News of a Kidnapping (1996, tr. 1997), chronicles drug-related abductions in Colombia.
See studies by M. Wood (1990) and H. Oberhelman (1991); collections of critical essays ed. by B. McGuirle and R. A. Cardwell (1987), J. Ortega (1988), and H. Bloom (1989).
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