Álvaro Cepeda Samudio

Álvaro Cepeda Samudio (March 30, 1926 – October 12, 1972) was a Colombian journalist, novelist, short story writer, and filmmaker.

Within Colombia and Latin America, Cepeda Samudio is known as an important writer and journalist, credited with having a large influence on much of the artistic, intellectual and political climate of mid-20th century Colombia.

Cepeda Samudio is less famous outside his home country. Internationally, he is known primarily as part of the influential artistic and intellectual circle in Colombia that included fellow writer and journalist Gabriel García Márquez—with whom he was also a member of the more particularized Barranquilla Group—and painter Alejandro Obregón, among others. Only one of his works, La casa grande, has received much notice beyond the Spanish-speaking world, having been translated into several languages, including English and French.

Early life and education Álvaro Cepeda Samudio was born in Barranquilla (although his birthplace is commonly mistaken for the town of Ciénaga, where his family was from ), Colombia, two years before striking United Fruit Company workers at Ciénaga's railroad station were massacred by the Colombian army, an event that with age became pivotal to the writer's social- and political-consciousness, as evidenced in its central role in his only novel, La casa grande. Known as the Santa Marta Massacre, the incident is also depicted in Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) (1967), the seminal novel of his close friend Gabriel García Márquez, and served a similar motivating principle in his dedication to social and political awareness through journalism and literature, among other means. He enrolled at the Colegio Americano, an English-language school in Barranquilla, for elementary and high school. In the spring of 1949, he traveled to Ann Arbor, MI, United States and attended the University of Michigan English Language Institute for the summer term. For the fall term in the 1949–50 school year he attended Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City. For the winter term, he attended what is now Michigan State University (then Michigan State College) in Lansing, MI before returning home to Barranquilla.

Journalistic career As with many of the core members of the Barranquilla Group, Cepeda Samudio began his career as a journalist, writing first, in August 1947, for El Nacional, where his first short stories were also published. Along with García Márquez and fellow journalists and Barranquilla Group members Alfonso Fuenmayor and , he founded the weekly newspaper Crónica in April 1950, dedicating its pages primarily to literature and sports reporting. Cepeda Samudio made the point to include, for the first eight months of its publication, a foreign short story in each issue. He also spent time writing columns for the Barranquilla daily newspaper El Heraldo, for which his wife, Tita Cepeda, currently contributes cultural columns. In 1953, he was offered the general management position of this paper, which he accepted with great enthusiasm, telling García Márquez that he wanted to transform it "into the modern newspaper he had learned how to make in the United States", at Columbia University. However, it was "a fatal adventure," owing, García Márquez suggests, to the fact that "some aging veterans could not tolerate the renovatory regime and conspired with their soulmates until they succeeded in destroying their empire." Menton suggests that, in this way, it "is one of the important forerunners of One Hundred Years of Solitude," The influence of Cepeda Samudio, not solely on the works of later Colombian and Latin American writers, but also on García Márquez, is evident not only in the latter writer's confessions in his autobiography of "imitating" In the final chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the fictionalized Barranquilla Group, referred to as the "four friends", leaves Macondo, "Álvaro" being the first among them. In preparation for his departure, the narrator states that Álvaro bought an eternal ticket on a train that never stopped traveling. In the postcards that he sent from the way stations he would describe with shouts the instantaneous images that he had seen from the window of his coach, and it was as if he were tearing up and throwing into oblivion some long, evanescent poem.