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Education and Adulthood

After arriving at Sucre, it was decided that Gabriel should start his formal education and he was sent to an internship in Barranquilla, a port on the mouth of the Río Magdalena. There, he gained a reputation of being a timid boy who wrote humorous poems and drew humorous comic strips. Serious and little interested in athletic activities, he was called El Viejo by his classmates.

García Márquez took his first years of high school in the Colegio jesuita San José (today Instituto San José) from 1940, in which he published his first poems in the school magazine Juventud. Later, thanks to a scholarship given to him by the government, Gabriel was sent to study in Bogotá where he was relocated to the Liceo Nacional de Zipaquirá, a town located one hour from the capital, where he would finish his secondary studies.

During his time at the Bogotá study house, García Márquez excelled in various sports, becoming team captain of the Liceo Nacional Zipaquirá team en three disciplines, soccer, baseball, and track.

After his graduation in 1947, García Márquez stayed in Bogotá to study law at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, where he had a special dedication to reading. La metamorfosis by Franz Kafka «in the false translation of Jorge Luis Borges» was a work that especially inspired him. He was excited with the idea of writing, not traditional literature, but a style similar to his grandfather's stories, in which «they inserted extraordinary events and anomalies as if they were simply an aspect of everyday life». His desire to to be a writer grew. A little later, he published his first , La tercera resignación, which appeared in the September 13th, 1947 edition of the newspaper El Espectador.

Though his passion was writing, he continued with law in 1948 to please his father. After the so called «Bogotazo» in 1948, some bloody disturbances that happened April 9th caused by the assassination of popular leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the university closed indefinitely and his pension was burned. García Márquez transferred to the Universidad de Cartagena and began working as a reporter of El Universal. In 1950, he ceased from converting himself into a lawyer to focus on journalism and moved again to Barranquilla to work as a columnist and reporter in the newspaper El Heraldo. Though García Márquez never finished his higher studies, some universities, like the Universidad de Columbia New York, have given him an honorary doctorate in writing.