How does a child born in a small tropical town grow up to become a greatwriter?

As a small boy Gabriel García Márquez drew accomplished pictureswell before he could read and write, and his early experience in a Montessorischool may have helped him acquire the remarkable sensuality and plasticity soevident in his literary art. The first work he remembered reading was theOne Thousand and One Nights, in which Scheherazade managesto survive by enchanting the murderous caliph with the hypnotic beauty of herstorytelling – an appropriate antecedent, perhaps, for any Latin Americanchild wishing to be a writer in that most politically risky of continents.Later, adding to the exotic impact of that magical serial, he read such typicalboyish adventure stories as The Count of Monte Cristo,Treasure Island and the tales of Salgari, novels written bymasters of narrative, the sort of books which some writers forswear as theybecome more sophisticated but which for him remained eternal classics of thestoryteller’s art.

In high school in Zipaquirá , as a romantic adolescent, he turned to poetry. Fewcountries in Latin America were traditionally more committed to poetry, asagainst the novel, than Colombia. (Chile and Nicaragua would be two furtherexamples.) In the 1940s, when García Márquez was a student, Colombian poetryboasted a movement called Piedra y Cielo (Stone and Sky), ef ectively a nationalcontinuation of the avant-garde movements in Spain and Latin America in the1920s and 1930s, whose most notable representatives were Spain’s Federico GarcíaLorca and Chile’s Pablo Neruda – though all the poets of their generation owed avast debt to the end-of-the-century Nicaraguan modernist Rubén Darío , whomGarcía Márquez himself would always revere.