I decided to write a research paper about the brilliant Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His style of writing was influenced by his whole life. I was very excited about the exploration of his life and works. He is not only a writer but also a politically engaged person who always tries to help the poor and helpless people on earth. His writing also awakened foreign countries about the abuse of power in many Latin American countries. Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born on March 6, 1928, in Aracataca, as the son of Luisa Santiaga Marquez Iugaran and Gabriel Eligio Garcia. He was mainly raised by his maternal grandparents in Aracataca, a small banana town in Northern Colombia. Their house was filled with countless aunts and rumors of ghosts. His grandmother was very superstitious and a very good story teller. His grandfather had been a colonel in the "war of a Thousand Days" and also had the ability of telling excellent stories. Marquez's parents were more or less strangers to him. They did not have the money to raise him and let the grandparents be in charge of their little boy. Garcia Marquez later said: "I fell that all my writing has been about the experiences of the time I spent with my grandparents." When Gabriel was eight years old, his grandfather died, and because of his grandmother's increasing blindness, he had to move to his parents' home in Sucre. They sent him to a boarding school in Barranquilla, a port city at the mouth of the Magdalena River. The teachers described Garcia Marquez as a shy boy who wrote humorous poems and drew cartoons, and his classmates, therefore, called him "The Old Man." At the age of twelve, he was given a scholarship to a secondary school for gifted students, run by Jesuits in Zipaquira, 30 miles north of Colombia's capitol Bogota. In 1946 he enrolled in the "Universidad Nacional" in Bogota as a law student rather than as a journalist. He despised law studies, so he skipped classes and associated with literate socialists and budding journalists. "The Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka had a profound effect on Garcia Marquez because it showed him that literature did not have to follow a straight narrative and unfold a traditional plot. He also saw the similarities between his grandmother's and Kafka's way to tell stories. While pretending to study law, he worked for Bogota's newspaper, "El Espectador", which published his first story in 1946. Four years later, he moved to Barranquilla, associating with a literary circle called "El Grupo de Barranquilla", where he began to read Hemingway, Woolf and, most important, William Faulkner. In his virtual county of "Yoknapatawhpa", Marquez found the seeds for his future surreal and mysterious place of action "Macondo". In 1955, a naval disaster occurred in Colombia, and Marquez, working for "El...
