Many years before García Márquez sat down to write One Hundred Years of Solitude, he first had to learn how to transform the memories of his childhood and family history into literary characters and stories. In 1950, the writer, who was then twenty-two, visited his hometown of Aracataca, a village in Colombia’s Caribbean region. This visit prompted vivid memories of his childhood, when he lived in his maternal grandparents’ house and spent time with his relatives and extended family. The same year, he published “The Buendía House: Notes for a Novel,” the first known version of what eventually became One Hundred Years of Solitude. For the next two years, he kept publishing fragments of a manuscript in progress called “The House.” These fragments described the everyday life of a rural village as seen by a child. In these, certain characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude appeared for the first time, Úrsula and Colonel Aureliano Buendía among them. Central themes in the future novel appeared, too: solitude and nostalgia. García Márquez returned to Aracataca in 1952 and expected to finish the novel in two years. To do so, he worked as an itinerant book salesman and spent several months touring the region, conducting literary fieldwork, and listening to people and their stories. Old memories and new experiences started making their way into his imagination. At the same time, he had to figure out how to connect life to literature, that is, how to turn people’s lives and stories into literary fiction.
THE MAKING OF ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE
| 1927 | García Márquez born in Aracataca, Colombia. |
| 1927–1936 | Spends childhood in his maternal grandparents’ house in Aracataca, source of inspiration for his novel. |
| 1944 | Starts reading writers who shape his literary imagination. |
| 1948 | Joins art groups in Cartagena and Barranquilla that train him professionally. |
| 1950 | Visits Aracataca and comes up with the first ideas for the novel that becomes One Hundred Years of Solitude. |
| 1950 | Publishes the story “The Buendía House: Notes for a Novel.” |
| 1950–1951 | Publishes fragments from a manuscript called “The House.” |
| 1952 | Visits Aracataca and announces that “The House” will be ready in two years. |
| 1953 | Travels in the Colombian departments of Cesar, Magdalena, and La Guajira, where the novel is partly set. |
| 1956 | Resumes work on “The House” in Paris but ends up writing No One Writes to the Colonel. |
| 1957–1961 | Publishes numerous pieces of literary journalism in which he develops the style in One Hundred Years of Solitude. |
| 1961 | Joins, in Mexico City, the art group called the Mafia, which soon leads the way for the New Latin American Novel. |
| 1962 | Tries to resume work on an old project, a book of fantastic stories, but instead stops writing fiction and moves to scriptwriting. |
| 1963 | A defeated García Márquez gives up on writing the biography of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, the central character in One Hundred Years of Solitude. |
| 1964 | International success of the New Latin American Novel, of which García Márquez was well informed and more involved. |
| 1965 | Signs a contract with Balcells Agency to represent him in all languages. |
| 1965 | Starts writing One Hundred Years of Solitude and initiates conversations with publishers Sudamericana, Seix Barral, and Harper & Row. |
| 1965–1966 | Friends, writers, and critics in eleven countries on three continents do research for the novel or read fragments as García Márquez writes it. |
| 1966 | The writer and his peers start promoting the novel in over twenty countries three months before finishing it and one year before its publication. |
| 1967 | Sudamericana publishes One Hundred Years of Solitude in Buenos Aires. |
To connect life to literature, García Márquez needed to learn skills and conventions used by professional writers, such as telling a story with a given style and developing credible characters. This professional training came through groups of artists that he joined in several countries in Latin America and Europe over the next decade. Yet these groups did not teach García Márquez skills and conventions for literary writing in a naked way. They taught him skills and conventions that were dressed, so to speak, with the clothing of certain ideas. And some of these ideas were present in exemplar texts that the young García Márquez imitated in his early works. These texts were written by modernist authors such as William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, and Virginia Woolf, Colombian writers such as poets of the movement Piedra y cielo, Latin American authors such as Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges, and Spanish writers such as Federico García Lorca and Ramón Gómez de la Serna. Other ideas were shared with him in person by influential peers.
Seeking to work as a full-time writer, García Márquez moved from one country to another, joining other art groups. In each location, he practiced new skills, and new ideas entered his literary imagination. Rather than being unique, his imagination in reality was becoming more and more similar to that of three generations of writers, critics, and publishers that had started to believe that Latin American literature existed and that its moment had finally arrived. What followed the collaboration across these generations was the rise of the New Latin American Novel in the 1960s, also known as the Latin American Boom. García Márquez saw this boom unfold firsthand and soon was one of the writers at the center of this international literary movement. By then, he knew that works of the New Latin American Novel were instant best sellers and award-winning books in Latin America, the United States, and Europe. Like several of his peers, he realized that his moment had come. Between 1965 and 1967, he committed all his time and energy to writing a story that he had struggled to finish for more than a decade. The result was One Hundred Years of Solitude.
García Márquez wrote a book about solitude in the company of many collaborators. They lived in eleven countries on three continents. From their locations, they helped him to imagine the novel and gave him feedback on his writing from beginning to end. Even when he felt alone writing, he could say so to his collaborators in person, over the phone, and by mail, and they listened and sought to relieve him. Never before had