Gabriel García Márquez
Pawned the heater and the mixer to finish a novel, then could only afford to post half of it
Gabriel García Márquez was born in Aracataca, a banana town on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, and was left in the care of his maternal grandparents until he was eight. His grandfather was a colonel who told him about the civil wars; his grandmother told him about ghosts and omens in exactly the same tone of voice. That tone would become his.
He studied law in Bogotá because his father insisted, dropped out and became a reporter, working for newspapers in Cartagena, Barranquilla and Bogotá. In 1955 his paper sent him to Paris and then closed, leaving him stranded and broke for months, collecting bottles to return for cash and writing a short novel about a colonel who waits every week for a pension that never comes.
By 1965 he was living in Mexico City with his wife Mercedes and two sons, writing film scripts and advertising. Driving to Acapulco one day the first sentence of a novel came to him, and he turned the car round. For the next eighteen months he wrote every day while Mercedes kept the household going on credit and pawned the car, the television, the heater and her hair dryer. When it was done they could not afford to post the whole manuscript to the publisher in Buenos Aires, so they sent the second half first, by mistake. One Hundred Years of Solitude sold out its first printing within weeks in 1967.
He won the Nobel Prize in 1982 and died in Mexico City in 2014.