Drawing inspiration from a writer’s style is one thing, but doing it effectively is another. To ensure that he used the techniques from these writers correctly, García Márquez began to do something he repeated for the rest of his professional life: he shared his writing in progress with different audiences. He read fragments of “The House” and Leaf Storm to his siblings and friends. He would ask them specific questions that ranged from soliciting their advice on whether a word or sentence was necessary to their opinion about the general argument of the text. He also gave his manuscripts to collaborators such as Germán Vargas (to whom he dedicated Leaf Storm) and Alfonso Fuenmayor, who assisted him with syntax and proofreading of his texts. He used the technique of sharing his work obsessively during the writing of One Hundred Years of Solitude.26
García Márquez was learning how to get his work published along the way, because the Barranquilla and Cartagena Groups did not limit their efforts to talk about literature. They also sought to promote their literary agendas in periodicals. For this reason, García Márquez got involved with at least two short-lived publishing ventures, Comprimido in Cartagena and Crónica in Barranquilla. Comprimido claimed to be the world’s small newspaper, with a trim size of seventeen by thirteen centimeters and only eight pages in length. For the first time, García Márquez worked as newspaper chief editor. The mission of Comprimido was to deliver news to readers in an enjoyable, fast, and compressed manner. But this free newspaper, which printed about five hundred copies daily, lasted only six issues. Next, he worked, along with Fuenmayor, as managing editor of Crónica. Local in scope and circulation, this weekly magazine had a print run of two thousand copies, most of which went unsold. It lasted fourteen months and published fifty-two issues. Crónica printed sports news, short fiction by the members of the Barranquilla Group (García Márquez included), and North and Latin American writers.27 But besides these opportunities, the Cartagena and Barranquilla Groups could not help García Márquez publish his literary work with a commercial press.
His first main publishing opportunity came through the poet Álvaro Mutis, about whose work García Márquez wrote in his column in 1951. They became lifetime friends and collaborators. About that time, Mutis told him that an acquisitions editor from Losada, the prestigious Argentine publisher, was looking for new talent in Colombia. García Márquez asked his group friends and one of his siblings for help polishing a book manuscript. Losada received at least two submissions: El Cristo de espaldas (Christ on His Back) by Eduardo Caballero Calderón and Leaf Storm. It only published the former. Losada’s manuscript reader, the critic and Spanish exile Guillermo de Torre, rejected Leaf Storm because, in his opinion, the Spanish language in this novella was too exotic, along with other flaws. According to the reviewer, these flaws were so obvious that he advised García Márquez to quit writing altogether. This rejection was a major blow for the twenty-four-year-old writer. His group of friends had to convince him that his novella was good, regardless of the gatekeeper’s opinion. “Everyone knows that Spaniards are stupid,” said Cepeda Samudio to his saddened friend. Counterfactually, had not García Márquez received emotional support from friends in Cartagena and Barranquilla, he might have quit fiction and stuck to daily news coverage and the occasional short story published in a newspaper, as he had done until then. But these groups trained him on how to borrow techniques from classic and mainstream contemporary writers. They also moved him away from intellectual short stories by showing him how to connect fiction writing to real-world life experiences. By the time he left the Caribbean, he had a lifetime connection to these collaborators, who were key supporters as he wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude.28
The Journalist Succeeds in Bogotá
Back in the country’s capital, García Márquez tried his luck at journalism. He worked for the national newspaper El Espectador. During these years, he had his first major success, but it was as a news reporter, not as a literary writer. In 1955, he published “The Odyssey of the Surviving Shipwrecked Sailor from the A.R.C. Caldas,” a reportage that told the story of a Colombian sailor who survived on a life raft on the open sea for ten days without food and water after his ship capsized in heavy waves in the Caribbean. It ran as a series of installments for fourteen consecutive days. It was “the biggest print run any Colombian newspaper has ever published,” as reported to García Márquez’s biographer Gerald Martin. To imagine this story, he repeated the writing formula that he learned in writing Leaf Storm under the supervision of the Cartagena and Barranquilla Groups. He used as his models an Ancient Greek classic and a successful, contemporary literary work. The first model was Homer’s Odyssey, and the second was Hemingway’s realist novel The Old Man and the Sea (1952), which he read in the magazine Life en Español in 1953 translated into Latin American Spanish. By writing with such a formula, García Márquez turned what was supposed to be a simple reportage of a shipwrecked sailor into a literary experiment. It is worth noting that José Salgar, the newspaper editor who assigned García Márquez the story, claimed that he had “more brilliant and more skillful journalists” to write it. After the success of that story, García Márquez received an offer to publish his first book and moved away from daily news coverage to writing journalistic series (series periodísticas). In these series, García Márquez continued to combine fact reporting with a literary style. Since he could not find a publisher for his new fiction writing, these series were key to his professional growth. Between 1955 and 1959, they were also his only means of literary expression (more on this below).29
While he improved his skills as a reporter, García Márquez learned another set of skills from writing film reviews. As a film critic for El Espectador, every week he reviewed an average of three movies released in Bogotá. He worked as a critic for about a year and reviewed all kinds of films, from Hollywood and Disney blockbusters to Latin American films and European independent movies. Film reviewing helped him to think about character construction, storytelling, editing, and other technical aspects that he commented on repeatedly.
He developed a special taste for films of Italian neorealism. After World War II, it was one of the most influential trends in cinema. He was attracted to the ways in which neorealism portrayed the lives of the working class and ordinary people facing dire situations as well as magical events. He wrote enthusiastic reviews of the now classic neorealist films Bicycle Thieves, Miracle in Milan, and Umberto D., among others. About Bicycle Thieves, he concluded, it is “the most humane film ever made.” About Miracle in Milan, he wrote a long and detailed review rather than his customary review of three films in one piece. He was fascinated by its seamless combination of fantasy and reality. As he put it, this movie “is quite a fairy tale, but set in an unusual environment, and it mixed, in a real manner, the fantastic and the real, to the point that in many cases it is not possible to know where the one ends and where the other begins.” At several points in this review, he also pointed out specific examples of how the film made it possible for viewers to believe that the most fantastic of events were completely normal for the characters. And about Umberto D., he wrote, “Its greatness lies in the fidelity with which it resembles life. [Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini] have shown the tremendous pathos present in the simple act of going to bed.”30
Thanks to his writing as a film critic, García Márquez learned about the conventions of cinematic language and storytelling, conventions that enriched his literary imagination. And thanks to his writing on neorealist cinema in particular, he nurtured a sensibility for fantastic events happening in ordinary, daily situations. This mixture of magic and reality was crucial to the imagination he needed in order to write One Hundred Years of Solitude and became the basis of his own magical realist style.
Although García Márquez could not find publishers for his work, he started to win literary awards. In 1954, he won a short story contest organized by the National Association of Writers and Artists of Colombia. He wrote the award-winning story “One Day after Saturday” in 1953 and it came out the following year in Magazín Dominical, the Sunday literary supplement of El Espectador, which had published