Ernest Hemingway and Gabriel García Márquez: Cultural Ascendancy and the Shaping of Literary Figures

Ernest Hemingway and Gabriel García Márquez share a number of traits in their development as writers. Both men achieved both literary and commercial success during their lifetimes. Both were driven to express themselves in writing from an early age; both began that quest as journalists. Both traveled to Europe as correspondents, and both wrote fiction in Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, Havana, and Mexico City, often choosing to write about one place while living in another. The two share a love of Spain and of Cuba, sympathy for the tenets of the Cuban revolution, and an acquaintance in the person of Fidel Castro. Both received the Nobel Prize for literature at the age of fifty-five, and both are highly praised throughout the world. Still, the two men developed quite distinct writing styles as their crafts evolved, and each is representative of the culture that shaped the writer. Hemingway produced a literature of the individual. His themes of rugged individualism, loneliness, isolation, despair, decadence, disillusionment, grace, and solitude epitomize the American loss of innocence in the years following World War I. García Márquez’s work is a literature of a different kind of solitude—one experienced not by an individual, but by an entire people. His works explore the human condition of the people of Latin America by revealing their collective dreams, flaws, misfortunes, triumphs, and passions. Ernest Hemingway and Gabriel García Márquez are legendary literary figures, whose works have touched millions and will convey their message for generations to come: the message of life, death, love, solitude, and two quite valid, yet uniquely distinct, realities.