Introduction

The year 2002 marked the 20 th anniversary of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature honoring Gabriel García Márquez. This work gathers his literary works, as well as the entire body of literary criticism that he has inspired.

The Year 1992 celebrated the Jubilee of Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude). His memorable acceptance speech (“The Solitude of Latin America”) reverberated throughout the world, and the literary community responded by writing profusely about the new Latin American literature and its writers.

“Even before his Nobel Prize, secondary writings on García Márquez had constituted something of an annual flood. Since October 1982 that flow has grown into an ever-present deluge.” By 1992, One Hundred Years of Solitude had been translated into twenty-seven languages according to some estimates, and thirty-seven taught in American universities along with the works of other great literary writers of the twentieth century.

The first book which gathered primary and secondary material necessary for complete research on García Márquez and his works was published by Greenwood Press in 1980 under the title Gabriel García Márquez: An Annotated Bibliography, 1947-1979 by Margaret Eustella Fau, a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Fau’s bibliography won the prestigious “Choice” award.

In 1975, after producing his novel of power and dictatorship, El otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch), García Márquez publicly declared that he would not write another novel until Chile’s dictator Augusto Pinochet was out of power. Some critics, however, attributed his disappearance from the narrative scene to his annoyance with the adverse criticism of El otoño del patriarca. In 1981, García Márquez made his triumphant return to the literary world with the publication of Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Chronicle of a Death Foretold), which some critics consider to be his best work.

Since the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to García Márquez, there has been a proliferation of literary criticism and interpretation of his works. This abundance created the need for an additional bibliography to update the previous volume by including all available items from 1979-1985 as well as any citations that were omitted from the first volume because of difficulties in acquiring the works or simply because they were unknown to the compiler at that time.

In 1986, Greenwood Press published as number seven of the series “Bibliographies and Indexes in World Literature” the Bibliographic Guide to Gabriel García Márquez, 1979-1985, which was compiled by Margaret Eustella Fau and Nelly Sfeir de González, both faculty members of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Material (SALALM) awarded this edition the prestigious “José Toribio Medina Award” for its outstanding contribution to Latin American scholarship. This award recognized the value of this work as a reference source necessary for research on the Nobel laureate.

The 1986-1992 work, which updated its two predecessors, was presented with the intention of providing the most comprehensive and current bibliography at that time. I consulted hundreds of journals, books, newspapers, and databases to provide accurate citations and informative annotations. This tremendous task was possible because more than eighty percent of the material was available from the excellent research resources at the University of Illinois Library at Urbana-Champaign. The rest of the material was obtained through the services provided by the inter-library loan system. This work was also awarded the “José Toribio Medina Award” in recognition for its scholarly value.

The love of “Gabito” begun by Margaret Eustella Fau was passed on to me. She retired in 1987 after a successful career at the University of Illinois Library. I have carried on the work, and the continuous updating of this work is the expression of my love for “Gabito.”

The works and editions by García Márquez are listed under Primary Sources, please keep in mind that editors and publishers in the Spanish language use the word edition to indicated both editions and reprints of the same work. A further complication is that editorial houses in Colombia, Spain, Mexico and Argentina publish García Márquez’s works simultaneously and claim that theirs is the “first edition.” I have divided the works by publishers and have included the number of pages of each edition, leaving the discussion about which is the official or pirate edition to the literary scholars.

In the chapter on Stories and Anthologies I have listed the short stories included in each anthology. I made an effort to make this part as complete as possible. I have included any editions of the short stories that were omitted in the three previous bibliographies.

The past update, 1992-2002, came out at the same time as García Márquez’s Vivir para contarla, and the literary criticism of this work, as well as others he continues to write, has been and continues to be material for future editions such as this one. Now, in 2004, García Márquez recently published Memoria de mis putas tristes, giving us even more data to input and update. Nevertheless, I have included the bibliographic citations of the first five editions published simultaneously by Vintage, Mondadori, Sudamericana, Diana, and Knopf.

If this book provides scholars, professors, librarians, students, as well as “aficionados” with a reference tool to aid in further study and research on García Márquez, then the time and effort expended on its production have been well worthwhile.

Bell-Villada. García Márquez: The Man and His Work, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), p. 221.

Samper Pizano, Daniel, “25 Years of the ‘Boom,’” World Press Review, v. 39, no. 8 (August, 1992), p. 52.