at this point made him unique from other students. He was simply a creative and talented student on a scholarship, who had the typical difficulties of a shy teenager to blend in socially. In his case, some of his peers looked down on him as a pueblerino for his provincial and rural roots.6
The twenty-year-old García Márquez began his writing career as a journalist. For aspiring writers, success in journalism was the best way to publish literary works in a region with a divided and local publishing industry. For fifteen years, from 1948 to 1963, his tasks in journalism were various, including writing daily news coverage, headlines, notes, columns, reportages, and film reviews. He also worked as an editor for newspapers (including tabloids), cultural supplements, and general interest magazines. Over those years, he acquired valuable professional skills for a writer: from data gathering for stories to design, editing, and marketing. And he learned and practiced such skills in Bogotá, Cartagena, and Barranquilla (Colombia), Paris, Eastern Europe, London, Caracas, New York, and Mexico City. The downside was that he could not write fiction full-time until the mid-1960s. He wrote his short stories and novellas either at night, after the newspaper was sent to press, or at home on weekends and holidays.
First Steps in Bogotá
Unlike his peers Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, José Donoso, or Carlos Fuentes, García Márquez received no support from family wealth or prestigious institutions so that he could turn literature into his main occupation. He was the first of eleven siblings and expected to be the family’s breadwinner along with his father. In 1947, he started a law degree at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá, as his father dictated. A law degree was then one of the means of upward social mobility in the country if one wanted to join the ruling elite. But he was not a committed student. He was more interested in the arts. Yet even gaining admission to Bogotá’s art circles was difficult for him because of his provincial origins, lack of economic means, bohemian lifestyle, shabby appearance, and status of costeño (the derogatory way in which people in the capital often refer to people from the Caribbean coast). He hung out with journalists and writers who eventually gave him access to these circles.7
One of his costeño friends introduced him to Eduardo Zalamea Borda, a modernist writer and author of Cuatro años a bordo de mí mismo (Four Years Aboard Myself, 1934), a Colombian version of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Zalamea Borda was the editor of El Espectador. In the pages of this national newspaper, he had recently made a call to young writers to send him short stories, a little cultivated genre in Colombia. (Young writers were fascinated by poetry and so was García Márquez then.) Borrowing techniques from Franz Kafka’s modernist fiction, García Márquez sent the short story “The Third Resignation,” which the newspaper published in its weekend literary supplement. He published another two short stories influenced by Kafka’s fantastic style and the intellectualism of literary circles of Bogotá. On April 9, 1948, presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was assassinated in the capital. What followed was El Bogotazo, violent riots that destroyed much of the city and made it unsafe for a college-age García Márquez to stay. He returned to the Caribbean coast and more importantly to his culture.
Between Cartagena and Barranquilla
If El Bogotazo had not occurred, García Márquez would have continued studying law, pursuing his career in journalism, and writing “intellectual” short stories. To his family’s dismay and anger, he dropped out of law school to be a journalist and to write fiction. He worked full-time for the newspapers El Universal in Cartagena and El Heraldo in Barranquilla between 1948 and 1953. He also joined two collaborative groups that left a lifelong mark on his creative imagination.8 It was while he was living there and returning to his Caribbean roots that he first imagined the novel that became One Hundred Years of Solitude.
García Márquez soon built bridges between journalism and literature. He used his columns to develop and publicize his literary agenda among readers. His earliest statement on literature appeared in his column “La Jirafa” (“The Giraffe”) published in the Barranquilla newspaper El Heraldo on April 24, 1950. He was then at work on his first novella. In his column, he stated, “There has not yet been written in Colombia a novel evidently and fortunately influenced by Joyce, Faulkner, or Virginia Woolf.” In another column printed the following year on February 9, he said that Faulkner, Kafka, and Woolf were his favorite writers and added, “My greatest aspiration is to be able to write like them.” In between these two columns, on June 3, 1950, he published “La casa de los Buendía: apuntes para una novela” (“The Buendía House: Notes for a Novel”). This was his first known attempt at writing One Hundred Years of Solitude. The commercial success and the consecration of several of the abovementioned writers during García Márquez’s formative years shaped his literary imagination. He wanted to be as influential as they were. And he knew that to achieve such an influence he had to reach multiple audiences. He already had them in mind when writing his first novella. In an interview, he said, “It is a work that the public can like . . . that will be popular and that, therefore, will demonstrate that the contemporary novel can reach the masses . . . drivers, shoe shiners, lottery vendors.”9
Reaching the masses the way García Márquez wanted was impossible at the time in Colombia. When he started working as a journalist in 1948, the government had suppressed civil rights, turned to authoritarian rule, and in the end fell into a military dictatorship that lasted five years. Among its anti-democratic actions, the government imposed censorship to control printed media nationwide. Government decrees in 1949 created the Office of Prior Censorship, which authorized censors to scrutinize the contents of any periodical before publication. Not coincidentally, García Márquez’s first known piece of journalism was about the military curfew in Cartagena. At this moment, different “teachers” trained him on how to deal with censorship. At El Universal, his supervisor was managing editor Clemente Manuel Zabala. “A reporter,” García Márquez recalled, “finds a good editor and can move forward professionally.” At first, Zabala edited García Márquez’s writing every day and taught him, pen in hand, what could be written and how to write it. Next, he witnessed a government censor’s actions in the newspaper’s headquarters every day after 6 p.m. The censor read the next day’s edition before it went into print. Thus, the budding writer also saw how the censor (a special kind of gatekeeper, as shown in the previous chapter) edited his writing by removing what could upset the government. Finally, the text was sent to the newspaper’s proofreaders, where García Márquez learned additional editing skills. This extra learning opportunity happened in a casual and unintended way; the journalist often hung out at bars with proofreaders and linotypists after closing hours, since he stayed up until late at night to work on his short stories and novellas.10
During the years García Márquez lived in Cartagena and Barranquilla, he wrote nearly four hundred pieces of journalism. Most of them required censors’ approval. As he soon realized, censorship “was a creative challenge,” as he put it. Among his creative solutions was to write with an “objective” narrative style that would give censors the impression of mere fact reporting. This daily routine of dealing with censorship taught him useful skills: how to see his own writing as an outsider and how to use the outsider’s view to edit his work before submitting it for review. Years later, in the newspaper El Espectador of Bogotá, he had a reputation among his peers for delivering very polished originals after obsessive rewriting and copyediting. He also started to transfer these skills to his literary writing, especially to anticipate and overcome criticism from gatekeepers in publishing and educated readers of his work. As he said about his writing ethic after publishing his first book, “It is necessary to write a lot, delete, edit, tear apart many sheets, so that one can finally bring to the editor a few pages.”11
García Márquez also faced censors as a fiction writer. Before publishing his third novella, In Evil Hour, he had to convince the priest Félix Restrepo, President of the Colombian Academy, that the novel’s text was decent. The priest was not really acting as a political censor but more as a moral one. He wanted
