Paula J. Rodriguez
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Biography is a book that is meant to be read by secondary students to assist when writing about the author. Gabriel Garcia Marquez hails from Columbia and is “an international best-selling author and a master of “magic realism”.” (2009, Pelayo). Gabriel Garcia Marquez has won the Felix Varela Medal from Cuba, the Novel Prize for Literature, and the Aztec Eagle Medal from Mexico. Included amongst his best works are 100 Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Biography includes an explanation of the format that is followed and how it can be used in conjunction with other titles when writing research papers. This book is part of a biographical series that was published by Greenwood Press and was written with “feedback from librarians and educators. Consideration was given to both curriculum relevance and inherent interest.” (Pelayo, 2009).
The biography was written by Ruben Pelayo, Professor Emeritus of Latin American Literature at Southern Connecticut State University. The format of the biography includes a series forward, acknowledgements, and an introduction that explains the basic format of the book. There is a timeline showing events as they occurred throughout Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s life from his birth through 2007. The chapters are formatted to cover one decade at a time and the author included notes at the end of each chapter showing his sources. There is also a “CODA” (Pelayo, 2009) in each chapter that shows what was happening politically at that point in the author’s life.
There are a few photographs and a bibliography at the end of the book that covers all the sources cited from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s own work within this book. This book is comprehensive but would be a good resource to start with when writing about Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Not only does the bibliography include the sources it also shows which sources were translated from the original. I believe this biography could be used both in literature and history classes to teach about Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the political climate he lived through when writing and publishing his writing.
WORKS CITED
Pelayo Rubén. Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Biography. Greenwood Press, 2009.
English Research Sources 