The life and work of Alvaro Cepeda Samudio.

PositionLITERATURE - Biography

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According to friend and journalist Daniel Samper Pizano, Álvaro Cepeda Samudio was a "boundless example of a Renaissance man." A journalist, editor, novelist and short-story writer, and director of two surrealist shorts--all little studied outside of Colombia--he is perhaps best remembered today as a member of the Barranquilla Group.

Fictionalized by Gabriel García Márquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude as the "last of Aureliano's four friends," and again alluded to familiarly in his Living to Tell the Tale as a "band of learned maniacs," the Barranquilla Group emerged spontaneously in the sultry Colombian port city of the same name in 1950. As García Márquez recalls, the alliance formed "almost through the power of gravity," with an affinity of spirit and intellect "that was indestructible but difficult to understand at first glance." The same natural impetus that drew them together in the first place--whether it was gravity, rum, writing, or camaraderie--would continue to take the group to Barranquilla's cafés, bars, brothels, and bookstores for endless nights of conversation and carousing over the next two decades.

With core players like Gabriel García Márquez, Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, Alfonso Fuenmayor, and Germán Vargas, anal the "wise Catalán" bookseller Don Ramón Vinyes as its mentor, the Barranquilla Group drew in artists, intellectuals, and writers from around the city.

The group's principles and projects were multiple and many-sided, with regular activities that included denouncing the cultural and literary dominance of the capital, creating a space for the Caribbean in Colombian letters, arguing heatedly about Faulkner and, reportedly, teaching the prostitutes in the city's red-light district how to read.

While no single pursuit can fully represent the group's ideals, the young writers did absorb one lesson from their wandering compatriot José Félix Fuenmayor that may best describe the doctrine driving the artistic undertakings of the group: "Álvaro Cepeda and I spent hours listening to him," García Márquez writes about the elder Fuenmayor, "above all because of his basic tenet that the essential differences between life and literature were simple errors of form."

Indeed, Cepeda's entire legacy can be viewed as a relentless expression of the desire to realize Fuenmayor's philosophy by participating in a kind of literature, and a kind of lifestyle, that seeks to eliminate the gap between the written word and spoken language, between "high" art and popular culture, between fiction and reality.

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The accounts of Álvaro Cepeda Samudio's birth are infused with narrative wonder and uncertainty, much like his stories. It can be confirmed that he was born on March 30, 1926, and that his parents were Luciano Cepeda y Roca and Sara Samudio. The location of his birth, however, remains territory for dispute.

While it is generally believed that he is from Barranquilla, many publications, including the elegant anthology of his...

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