Gabriel García Márquez

This text seeks to give an account of the childhood experience in the Colombian Caribbean in the first half of the twentieth century through the memory of Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014), our Nobel Prize for Literature, who recognizes the intensity with which he lived this stage of his life being his main source of his literary inspiration. In this childhood experience, the importance of memory frameworks in the Colombian Caribbean is explicitly investigated: the family and the house, the small town of Aracataca, the role of the school and its teachers, the role of women, narrative and oral tradition, its relationship with reading, writing and imagination. The results of this research show the deep relationship that can exist between the experience of the children's world with the adult world as a source of literary inspiration.