Major Issues
Author Links
Essay Questions

Major Issues

In the discussion of literary influences, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ critics usually include Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. Like Faulkner, Garcia Marquez creates a fictional world and imbues it and its inhabitants with universal significance. Garcia Marquez’ invented world is Macondo, on the northern coast of Colombia. This small corner of the world is the setting for Garcia Marquez’ exploration of huge subjects, including death, love, and war. Garcia Marquez himself is also credited with influencing many other writers and is generally cited as the most important Latin American writer of the second half of the 20th century. Scholars have been greatly interested in Garcia Marquez’ adoption of the Magic Realist mode of writing, in which the fantastic and magical are integrated with the ordinary and realistic.

Author Links

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Macondo Home Page
This helpful site offers a biography, annotated critical bibliography, reviews, photos, and links.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez
This bio-critical introduction focuses on Garcia Marquez’ life and career highlights, as well as his importance in the magic realism movement.

More on Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Reviews of Garcia Marquez’ books, plus articles by and about Garcia Marquez from the The New York Times archives.

The Solitude of Latin American
The transcript of Garcia Marquez’ acceptance speech upon winning the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Mysteries of Bill Clinton
Intriguing essay in which Garcia Marquez compares Clinton to Hawthorne heroine Hester Prynne.