Gabriel had a brother who was also raised in the family of his grandparents. In 1936 the father took his sons to Sincé. A few months later, the family moved to Sucre, where Marquez Sr. started a pharmacy. Although the boys lived with their father, their grandparents had influenced their development very strongly.

Gabriel’s grandfather was a veteran of the Thousand Days War and a hero of Colombian Liberals. Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía had a great influence in shaping the outlook of his grandchildren. In the future Gabriel will call his grandfather as his "umbilical cord with history and reality".

At school, the future writer proved himself to be a timid child with a rich imagination. He was very serious and was never interested in children’s games or sports. The children even nicknamed Gabriel "the old man" for his taciturnity and passion for literature.

After graduating from high school, the young man entered college. During his student days, he began to publish his first poems. Soon he received a scholarship and went to study at a college in Sipakira, which is located near Bogota. Here, Marquez unexpectedly showed an interest in sports. He became the captain of the local running, football and baseball teams.

Although Marquez’s first works were created in the genre of "realism", later he experimented with other literary directions. The writer won real fame thanks to his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. This masterpiece is written in a style that would later be called "mystical realism".

In the two first works of the author one can notice references to La Violencia, a civil war between the liberals and the Colombian Conservative Party. The characters of these novels face curfew, strict censorship, and underground newspapers. In the first novel of the writer named Evil Hour you can also see references like this, but you can’t call it a platform for political propaganda.

Soon Gabriel, inspired by the flight of Venezuelan dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, started writing a so-called dictator novel The Autumn of the Patriarch. The writer worked on this book for seven years and it appeared in print in 1975.

In 1981, the author published a novel entitled Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The story was written in a pseudo-journalistic style. After a while, the work became the basis for the film directed by Francesco Rosi.

The creator of the work himself dubbed his novela a "poem on the solitude of power". The storyline of the novel includes a huge number of anecdotes from the life of the escaped politician. The book was splendidly accepted by the society.

The basis for the novel was a real love story of the writer’s parents. Marquez’s mum and dad’s names were Luisa and Gabriel. It’s interesting to know that Luisa’s father, Gabriel’s beloved grandfather, didn’t approve of his daughter’s choice at all. Gabriel Sr. was heard to be a famous womaniser. Marquez Sr. managed to obtain a marriage license from Louise’s parents only after he had written hundreds of love letters and poems to his sweetheart.

Four years later, the writer again addresses the topic of the biography of a military man. The resulting novel was called "The General in His Labyrinth". Literary critics cannot still agree on the genre of this novel. Especially for this work, the term "new historical novel" was invented. The new style reflects postmodernism, post-boom and the so-called Latin American boom.

In 1985 another novel by Marquez Love in the Time of Cholera went on sale. The work of the eminent Colombian immediately became a world bestseller. The plot of the novel is about love in all its manifestations, including the ideal and the indecent ones.

In addition to literature, Marquez was also interested in other forms of art. He took an active part in the creation of films and often acted as a screenwriter. The writer created more than 25 screenplays; 17 films were shot based on them.