Began career as reporter for Colombian newspapers.  Later freelanced in Paris, London, and Caracas (Venezuela). Also worked in Havana, Cuba and is on amiable terms with Fidel Castro.
G.M. is known as a Latin American Boom writer, along with such novelists as Mario Vargas Llosa, Alejo Carpentier, Isabel Allende, and Jorge Luis Borges.
G.M. is also admired for his use of magical realism.  Magical realism allows for the supernatural world to enter and commingle with reality.
Influences and Inspirations: journalism, travel, stories told by his grandparents, Faulkner
Themes: Forbidden love, The Individual and the Community (and the role of honor), The decay of aristocratic and autocratic life, the role of honor, the foretelling of the future, disease and dysfunction as metaphors for life, tradition versus modernity, truth and fiction.

Settings: Colombia, Colombian Caribbean where the Indian, Spanish, Immigrant, Mestizo, and Afro Caribbean cultures meet.  About the Caribbean he observes:
Clearly the Latin American environment is marvelous. . . particularly the Caribbean. . . The coastal people were descendants of pirates and smugglers, with a mixture of black slaves.  To grow up in such an environment is to have fantastic resources for poetry. Also, in the Caribbean, we are capable of believing anything, because we have the influences of all those different cultures, mixed in with Catholicism and our own local beliefs.  I think that gives us an open-mindedness to look beyond apparent reality. (Playboy interview with Claudia Dreifus, 1983)
Important works include:

• No One Writes to the Colonel (1961)
• One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
• Autumn of the Patriarch (1976)
• Chronicle of A Death Foretold (1981)(one of my favorites--I teach this in World Literature)
• The General in His Labyrinth (1989) (another favorite, about the life of Latin American liberator Simon Bolivar)
• Erendira ( 1983 beautiful and disturbing film)
• Milagro en Roma (film about the controversial canonization of a young Colombian girl)
• Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)
• Of Love and Other Demons (1994)

• Setting: 1740's, city of slave trade, one in competition with Cuba and other islands
• Class and race distinctions conveyed through space: slave quarters in marginal areas; landowners live in central quarters.
• Marquis lives in a mansion (marble floors, chandeliers, grandeur in Sierva's bedroom)
• Deterioration of architecture parallels decay of aristocracy and the isolationist mood of Marquis
• Slave yard--peppered with wooden shacks; increases and decreases in size
• Asylum--indication that the neighborhood is changing
• Lots of space afforded to Church, but Bishop's palace is also ill kept
• Guarding one's reputation is difficult in spaces that are both public and private
• Slave sections of city--Bernarda gains access through disguise
• Abrenuncio's home reflects an ordered mind, an educated one (speaks Latin)
• Horse is buried in consecrated ground
• Bernarda, Marquis and Sierva Maria prefer the marginal and forbidden spaces