Gabriel García Márquez: A Life

The first full and authorized biography of the 1982 Nobel Laureate in Literature—the most popular international novelist of the last fifty years. While telling the story of the young man who rose from obscure provincial journalist to progenitor of a new literature, Gerald Martin also considers the tensions in García Márquez’s life between celebrity and the quest for literary quality, between politics and writing, and between the seductions of power, solitude, and love. He explores the contrast in the writer’s homeland, Colombia, between the exuberance of his Caribbean background and the authoritarianism of highland Bogotá; and his turning away from the magical realism ofOne Hundred Years of Solitudetoward the greater simplicity that would mark his work beginning withLove in the Time of Cholera. Over the course of fifteen years, Gerald Martin interviewed not only “Gabo” himself, but also more than 300 others: including Fidel Castro, Spain’s former prime minister Felipe González, and several former presidents of Colombia; Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa, among other writers; García Márquez’s family, his literary agent, translators, and his closest friends as well as his consistent detractors. The result is a revelation of a life as gripping as any of the writer’s journalism and as enthralling as any of his fiction.