friends with most of these writers or had met them at professional conferences. They, in return, praised how he had drawn from Faulkner’s style in his work.
García Márquez did not learn on his own how to follow Faulkner’s writing method; members of the Barranquilla Group used it in their own writing as well. “We were seeing a reality,” the writer recalled, “and we wanted to tell it and we knew that the European method did not work, nor the traditional Spanish method; and suddenly we find out that the most appropriate to tell this reality is the Faulknerian method. At the end, this is not very unusual because I don’t forget that Yoknapatawpha County has shores in the Caribbean Sea; so he is a Latin American writer somehow.”
Reframing Faulkner as a Latin American writer helped García Márquez understand at the onset of his career that local Latin American stories and cosmopolitanism were not opposites in literature. As he said after publishing Leaf Storm in 1955, “My novel es costumbrista,” a style that tells stories grounded in everyday life, customs, and manners. For him, “Don Quixote is costumbrista. . . . So, I can call costumbrista any work that has the same purpose, that is, one that makes the local known within the universal.” He added that he had just started writing a new novel, Los catorce días de la semana (The Fourteen Days of the Week), which would be also costumbrista in its universal dimension. Ten years later, in 1965, when he started writing One Hundred Years of Solitude, the idea of a universal costumbrismo was fully rooted in his literary imagination. As he then explained in an interview, every great novelist is “in a certain sense regionalist. And even more costumbrista.”21
For a young writer interested in rural realist fiction, the discovery of the Latin American Faulkner was crucial in his literary education. With the assistance of his friends in Cartagena and Barranquilla, García Márquez made the connection between the rural south of the United States in Faulkner’s work and his personal experience growing up in the rural village of Aracataca. To further understand these connections, he visited other parts of the Magdalena Department, the Valley of Upar, and La Guajira as an itinerant book salesman in 1953 and 1954. “These trips,” he indicated, “ended up revealing to me the magic of a world without which my novels would not have been possible today.” The importance of the rural in his literary imagination was quite clear in the titles and contents of his novellas at the time. A draft of Leaf Storm was supposedly called Ya cortamos el heno (We Already Cut the Hay) and his third novella, In Evil Hour, was first entitled En este pueblo de mierda (In This Shit-Heap of a Town).22
Along with Faulkner, Hemingway was another writer who helped García Márquez imagine life in a literary way. As he said, “Hemingway taught me that you can invent whatever you want, as long as you make people believe in it.” He learned from Hemingway that key to the creative process was the manner in which a story is told, not just the story itself.23 And again his friends in Barranquilla and Cartagena helped him to write like Hemingway, as he intended, for example, in “The Woman Who Came at Six O’Clock.” He published this short story in 1950. But his friends were not convinced by it. They advised him to soften the pornographic tone and rework the dialogue and the ending. In their opinion, these changes were necessary if he wanted to achieve Hemingway’s objective style, which only describes the characters and their conduct as an observer would see them. To comply with how his collaborators interpreted Hemingway’s style, García Márquez could not write about the character’s interior world and subjectivity, something that he did in some of his early short stories inspired by Kafka’s style. The only thing that García Márquez could do was to stick to the facts that the writer could see, as if he were a news reporter. Following his friends’ feedback, he revised the short story and published it again two years later in the literary supplement of El Espectador. On the same page, he published “Auto-Crítica” (“Self-Criticism”).24 In this letter, he apologized to readers for writing dialogue that was too correct and whose style was more similar to Hemingway’s than to his. Therefore, the publication of “The Woman Who Came at Six O’Clock” and “Auto-Crítica” was a pivotal moment in his education as a writer. With the help of his collaborators, he was learning how to apply the literary styles of different authors to his work. By 1952, he could combine Hemingway’s realism with the fantastic elements that appeared in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (which he read in Latin American Spanish). This combination of realism and fantasy became a key feature of the style of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Along with Hemingway and Faulkner, other writers were a part of García Márquez’s literary imagination: Woolf, Huxley, Caldwell, Dos Passos, Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, Teodoro Dreiser, Robert Ripley, and Curzio Malaparte.25 He read works by most of them in translations into Latin American Spanish. This detail is important because, like sculptors draw inspiration from live models, his friends recall that García Márquez copied by hand or memorized paragraphs from several of these literary works, such as Woolf’s Orlando and Joyce’s Ulysses, which inspired him for aesthetic and technical reasons. Passages from these and other works then lived in his literary imagination and in the imagination of his Latin American peers. The fact that these writers and their works inspired many of García Márquez’s peers secured his admission a decade later into literary circles that controlled the New Latin American Novel. These circles included Fuentes—a fan of Faulkner’s novels and whose style he followed in his own writing—and Carpentier, who was a fan of Antigone and published enthusiastic reviews of representations of this play in Cuba and Haiti in the 1940s and 1950s. García Márquez met both of them in Mexico City, and they became collaborators in the making of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
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:
