Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature and popularized the genre of magical realism, died on Thursday at the age of 87. Here are some important dates in his life and career: 1927 – Garcia Marquez is born on March 6 in Aracataca, a backwater banana-growing town near Colombia’s Caribbean coast. The oldest child of a large family, he spends part of his childhood living with his grandparents and is especially close to his grandfather, a retired army man who inspired the novel “No One Writes to the Colonel.” 1940 – Garcia Marquez moves to Barranquilla, a port city famous for its Carnival, to start high school. 1947 – He studies law at the National University in the Colombian capital Bogota and has two short stories published in the El Espectador newspaper.
