The genius of García Márquez revealed in the largest exhibition of his life and work

The most comprehensive exhibition on the life and work of Gabriel García Márquez It can now be visited at the National Library of Colombia , to rediscover the legacy of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature and its impact on literature and global thought.

The exhibition, entitled Everything is Known: The Story of Gabo's Creation , is made up of nearly 450 objects, including manuscripts of stories, novels and articles, personal letters, drawings from childhood and adolescence, passports, books, magazines, newspapers, photos, videos, songs, suits, posters, maps, paintings and typewriters, among others.

Most of the objects come from the writer's personal archive, acquired by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin (USA) , but there will also be objects from the National Library's collection and from collections of Colombian and foreign institutions.

"The thematic focus of the exhibition is very clear: to explain to visitors how Gabriel García Márquez became a global writer ," said Spanish historian and sociologist Álvaro Santana Acuña, the exhibition's curator, in an interview.

The exhibition, which will be on display until August 2 , consists of seven sections that cover the life, intellectual and political career of the writer born in Aracataca (Magdalena), on March 6, 1927, and died in Mexico City, on April 17, 2014, at the age of 87.

The first section, entitled 'Origins', tells the story of his early years at his grandparents' house in Aracataca, "which shaped his literary vocation," as well as his high school studies in Zipaquirá, where he "voraciously read" authors such as Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, Mark Twain, Rubén Darío, and Miguel de Cervantes.

The second part, "A Novel Called Colombia," explores the years of his first short stories ; the violence of "El Bogotazo," following the assassination of liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán on April 9, 1948; his beginnings as a journalist; his friendship in Barranquilla with Caribbean writers and artists; and his reading of other Anglo-Saxon authors.

"Explaining this meant bringing to Colombia for the first time works of art, archives, and manuscripts that had never been seen here and that help us understand how Gabo was actually in dialogue with writers of his time who had a profound impact on him, such as William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortázar himself," Santana added.

In 'Towards the World', the third section, his departure to Europe in 1955 is addressed , his years in Paris, where he wrote No One Writes to the Colonel , his return to Latin America and his marriage to Mercedes Barcha, as well as his first years in Mexico City.

Section four, 'Writing Solitude', focuses on One Hundred Years of Solitude , a novel first published in 1967 in Buenos Aires and which catapulted him to literary success.

" We have practically everything about One Hundred Years of Solitude , because the heart of the exhibition is One Hundred Years of Solitude . The main room, number four, is dedicated to the creative process, production, and publication of the novel," explained Santana, a researcher at the Harry Ransom Center.

'Gabo's Carpentry' is section five, which addresses the creation of other works such as The Autumn of the Patriarch, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera and The General in His Labyrinth , a process he considered a carpentry job, as he said in a 1981 interview with The Paris Review.

Then there's "A Committed Writer," the sixth unit dedicated to his involvement in various political and cultural affairs ; his friendship with leaders such as Fidel Castro, Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev, and François Mitterrand; his return to journalism in Colombia; his passion for film; and the creation of the Foundation for New Ibero-American Journalism in Cartagena, which later became the Gabo Foundation.

The exhibition closes with section seven, 'The Global Writer,' about his consecration upon receiving the Nobel Prize, where he gave his famous acceptance speech, 'The Solitude of Latin America.'

This section includes congratulatory messages received from all over the world, from presidents to housewives, artists, unions, and even street children in Cali who barely knew how to read and write.

"We street kids know that the Nobel Prize is a very important thing, and since you've won it, we want you to know that we're very happy and we're celebrating at home. On October 31st, Children's Day, we'll make a float that represents one hundred years of loneliness," reads a handwritten letter from 1982.