aracataca a small colombian town near the caribbean coast on march 6 1927 he was the eldest of the 11 children of luisa santiaga marquez and gabriel elijio garcia a telegraphist and a wandering homeopathic pharmacist who was also something of a philanderer and fathered at least four children outside of his marriage just after their first son was born his parents left him with his maternal grandparents and moved to barranquilla where garcia marquezs father opened a pharmacy hoping to become rich garcia marquez was raised for 10 years by his grandmother and his grandfather a retired colonel who fought in the devastating 1000day war that hastened colombias loss of the panamanian isthmus his grandparents tales would provide grist for garcia marquezs fiction and aracataca became the model for macondo the village surrounded by banana plantations at the foot of the sierra nevada mountains where one hundred years of solitude is set i have often been told by the family that i started recounting things stories and so on almost since i was born garcia marquez once told an interviewer ever since i could speak garcia marquezs parents continued to have children and barely made ends meet their firstborn son was sent to a staterun boarding school just outside bogota where he became a star student and voracious reader favoring hemingway faulkner dostoevsky and kafka garcia marquez published his first piece of fiction as a student in 1947 mailing a short story to the newspaper el espectador after its literary editor wrote that colombias younger generation has nothing to offer in the way of good literature anymore his father insisted he study law but he dropped out bored and dedicated himself to journalism the pay was atrocious and garcia marquez recalled his mother visiting him in bogota and commenting in horror at his bedraggled appearance that i thought you were a beggar garcia marquezs writing was constantly informed by his leftist political views themselves forged in large part by a 1928 military massacre near aracataca of banana workers striking against the united fruit company which later became chiquita he was also greatly influenced by the assassination two decades later of jorge eliecer gaitan a galvanizing leftist presidential candidate garcia marquez suffered a strong official backlash to his story about how government corruption contributed to the disaster recounted in story of a shipwrecked sailor a dictatorship seized power and garcia marquez made a new home in europe after touring the sovietcontrolled east he moved to rome in 1955 to study cinema a lifelong love then he moved to paris where he lived among intellectuals and artists exiled from the many latin american dictatorships of the day garcia marquez returned to colombia in 1958 to marry mercedes barcha a neighbor from childhood days they had two sons rodrigo a film director and gonzalo a graphic designer after a 1981 runin with colombias government in which he was accused of sympathizing with m19 rebels and sending money to a venezuelan guerrilla group