Gabriel García Márquez

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00:00The Nobel Prize

00:13Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez was born on March 6, 1927,

00:21in the town of Aracataca, Colombia, near the Caribbean coast.

00:26He was the eldest of 12 children.

00:28His father was a postal clerk, telegraph operator, and itinerant pharmacist.

00:34And when García Márquez was eight, his parents moved away so his father could find a job.

00:40García Márquez was left to be raised in a large ramshickle house by his maternal grandparents.

00:47His grandfather, Nicolas Márquez Mejía, was a liberal activist and colonel during Colombia's Thousand Days War.

00:55García Márquez was educated at a Jesuit college and in 1946 began studying for the law at the National University of Bogotá.

01:06When the editor of the liberal magazine El Espectador wrote an opinion piece stating that Colombia had no talented young writers,

01:17García Márquez sent him a selection of short stories, which the editor published as Eyes of a Blue Dog.

01:23A brief burst of success was interrupted by the assassination of Colombia's president, Jorge El Esser Gaitán.

01:32In the following chaos, García Márquez left to become a journalist and investigative reporter in the Caribbean region,

01:40a role he would never give up.

01:41In 1954, García Márquez broke a news story about a sailor who survived the shipwreck of a Colombian navy destroyer.

01:51Although the wreck had been attributed to a storm, the sailor reported

01:55that badly stowed illegal contraband from the U.S. came loose and knocked eight of the crew overboard.

02:04The resulting scandal led to García Márquez's exile to Europe, where he continued writing short stories and news and magazine reports.

02:16García Márquez got the idea for his most famous work while he was driving from Mexico City to Acapulco.

02:22To get it written, he holed up for 18 months, while his family went into debt of $12,000, but in the end he had 1,300 pages of manuscript.

02:36The first Spanish edition sold out in a week, and over the next 30 years it sold more than 25 million copies

02:44and was translated into more than 30 languages.

02:47García Márquez was an exile from Colombia for most of his adult life,

02:53mostly self-imposed as a result of his anger and frustration that was taking over his country.

03:01He was a lifelong socialist and a friend of Fidel Castro's.

03:05He wrote for La Prensa y Navana and always maintained personal ties with the Communist Party in Colombia,

03:13even though he never joined as a member.

03:15A Venezuelan newspaper sent him behind the Iron Curtain to Balkan states,

03:22and he discovered that far from an ideal communist life, the Eastern European people lived in terror.

03:29He was repeatedly denied tourist visas to the United States because of his leftist lingings,

03:36but was criticized by the United States because of a

03:39the Romijn