The biography I have written here is quite thorough. You will be likely to get a very good knowledge of Garcia Marquez's life and the background of his literary works after reading it. There is also a more brief timeline available on this site that summarizes this biography.

BIOGRAPHY

Gabriel Jose Garcia Marquez was born on March 6, 1928 in Aracataca, a banana town in Colombia. The prodominant banana industry and the massacre of striking banana workers in 1928 were the events that influenced his work. He was raised by his maternal grandparents for eight years. Several of his superstitious aunts lived with him, and later he credited much of his storytelling style - telling fantasy stories as if they were the implacable truth, to his grandmother. In 1936, because of his grandfather's death and his grandmother's increasing blindness, Garcia Marquez returned to his parents' home in Sucre, a site of many non-Macondo stories.

Between 1936-1946, he studied in Barranquilla. In 1947, he entered the National University of Colombia in Bogota as a Law student. However, three years later, he abandoned law for journalism at the University of Cartagena. His fifteen stories were published in the newspaper El Espectador between 1950-1955. During this period, he began to admire modernists such as Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner. In Faulkner's mythical Yoknaputawpha, Garcia Marquez found the seeds for Macondo, and he began to grow dissatisifed with his earlier stories, believing them to be too abstracted.

Upon graduation, Garcia Marquez returned to Bogot as a reporter for El Espectador. His first novel Leaf Storm was published in 1955. In the same year, he travelled to Europe as correspondent for El Espectador, and finally settled in Paris where he found that he was out of job. After a brief stay in London, Garcia Marquez returned to Caracas to work as a journalist in 1957. His novel No One Writes to the Colonel was published in 1958, but he felt it was too far away from his imagined goal - a picture he had been developing for years. He knew his ultimate work would take place in the mythical town of Macondo, the name of a banana plantation near Aracataca, yet he still had to find the right tone for his tale.

In the same year, Garcia Marquez witnessed the fall of the Venezuela's dictator, which rooted the seed for The Autumn of the Patriarch. He also married Mercedes Barcha in Barranquilla. From 1959-1961, he worked for the Cuban news agency La Prensa in Cuba and New York. Afterwards he resided in Mexico and worked as a screenwriter, journalist, and publicist. The Evil Hour and Big Mama's Funeral were published in 1962, however, none of his works had sold over 700 copies. Yet still and still, the story of Macondo eluded his grasp.

On January 1965, the inspiration suddenly arose in his mind: he had found his tone - a natural tone expressed with an "unperturbed face". After eighteen months of seclusion, his masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude was published in June 1967. Within a week 5000 copies were sold, and half a million copies in 3 years. Success had come at last: the novel won the Chianchiano Prize in Italy, and was named the Best Foreign Book in France in 1969. In 1970, the book was published in English and was chosen as one of the best twelve books of the year by Time. Two years later Garcia Marquez was awarded the Romulo Gallegos Prize and the Neustadt Prize. In 1973, after the assassination of the president of Chile, he decided to take a more active political role. In 1974, he founded Alternativa in Bogota and participated in the Russell Tribunal to publicize human rights abuses in Latin America. A year later, Autumn of the Patriarch, a novel of an archetypical South American tyrant, was published.

In 1981, the year in which Garcia Marquez received the French Legion of Honor medal and Chronicle of a Death Foretold was published, the Colombian military accused him of conspiring with the M-19 guerrillas, and he seeked asylum in Mexico. Colombia soon regretted after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 - for his wonderful work in combining fantasy elements and mythology with realistic fiction (the style so-called magic realism). By 1986, his other famous novel Love in the Time of Cholera was born, which suggested undoubtly the universal appeal of Garcia Marquez as a writer. His other remarkable novels The General in his Labyrinth, Strange Pilgrims, and Love and Other Demons were published respectively in 1989, 1992, and 1994. By now one of the most world-known writers, he eased into a lifestyle of writing, teaching and political activism in Mexico City.