Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his grandfather 

 
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s grandfather introduced him to the literature world. When he was 5 
years old, he liked to spend time with his grandfather, His grandfather took him to a lot of places, 
one of those memorable places was Cataca. Gabriel directed to his grandfather as a not very 
educated person because he had a poor education in his natal city, He tells us a story about how 
his grandfather shot a gun in the civil war along the Caribbean. On a trip they had one day in 
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s childhood, they had a confusion because his grandfather didn't knew 
the difference between a camel and a dromedary and his grandfather had a very wide and big 
book in his office named “dictionary” a book in which you can find for the definition of all words 
that you want in a selected language, this dictionary was in spanish and it was the first contact of 
Gabriel Garcia Marquez with a book. 
 
His grandfather gave Gabriel a dictionary, which he saw as a very big word which his
grandfather described as the book that had all the words of the world, or more precisely, all
the Hispanic language words. The first time that he saw that very big book, he caught a lot of
curiosity, and he read all the dictionary as if it was a novel. That first contact with the
dictionary was the fundamental book that made him start his career as a writer himself as it
was some time ago before he died in 2014. He was a different kid who loved to listen to
stories. He always wanted to listen to more stories about everything, even in the streets,
musicians played songs which had stories about all type of things, a thing that Gabriel
Garcia Marquez loved and inspired him to make stories forward in his life.

Gabriel Garcia’s Grandfather was a very important person in Gabriel’s writing life he introduced 
him to the literary world and he influenced him to the work that will not only make him famous 
but also a very successful man in the literature world, as he made classics of the Colombian and 
Hispanic literature as 100 años de Soledad and cronica de una muerte anunciada, books that 
had been translated to different languages, making him one of the most influent writers in 
history. If his grandfather didn’t give him that dictionary and introduced him to literature, he 
would have been a very different person and we couldn’t know who is Gabriel Garcia Marquez.