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

As a small boy Gabriel García Márquez drew accomplished pictures well before he could read and write, and his early experience in a Montessori school may have helped him acquire the remarkable sensuality and plasticity so evident in his literary art. The first work he remembered reading was the One Thousand and One Nights, in which Scheherazade manages to survive by enchanting the murderous caliph with the hypnotic beauty of her storytelling – an appropriate antecedent, perhaps, for any Latin American child 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 typical boyish adventure stories as The Count of Monte Cristo, Treasure Island and the tales of Salgari, novels written by masters of narrative, the sort of books which some writers forswear as they become more sophisticated but which for him remained eternal classics of the storyteller’s art.

In high school in Zipaquirá , as a romantic adolescent, he turned to poetry. Few countries in Latin America were traditionally more committed to poetry, as against the novel, than Colombia. (Chile and Nicaragua would be two further examples.) In the 1940s, when García Márquez was a student, Colombian poetry boasted a movement called Piedra y Cielo (Stone and Sky), ef ectively a national continuation of the avant-garde movements in Spain and Latin America in the 1920s and 1930s, whose most notable representatives were Spain’s Federico García Lorca and Chile’s Pablo Neruda – though all the poets of their generation owed a vast debt to the end-of-the-century Nicaraguan modernist Rubén Darío , whom García Márquez himself would always revere.