outside his home country, where it derives primarily from his standing as having been part of the influential artistic and intellectual circle in Colombia in which fellow writer and journalist Gabriel García Márquez—with whom he was also a member of the more particularized Barranquilla Group—and painter Alejandro Obregón also played prominent roles.
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.
Along with García Márquez and fellow journalists and Barranquilla Group members Alfonso Fuenmayor and Germán Vargas, he founded the weekly newspaper Crónica in April 1950, dedicating its pages primarily to literature and sports reporting.
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",[3] at Columbia University.
He was also the Colombian bureau chief for Sporting News, based out of St. Louis, and ultimately secured his position as one of his country's preeminent journalists and editors by becoming the editor-in-chief first of El Nacional and later of the Diario del Caribe.
[2] He avidly sought out and championed what would have been, particularly at the time and in the considerably culturally conservative Colombia, considered "unorthodox" literature to many of his friends, notably García Márquez and other members of the Barranquilla Group, by introducing many to Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.
"[3] Cepeda Samudio's final publication of fiction was the short story collection Los Cuentos de Juana (1972), with illustrations by his good friend Alejandro Obregón.
[3] The two eventually made a short black and white feature together called La langosta azul (The Blue Lobster) (1954), which they co-wrote and directed based on an idea by Cepeda Samudio; García Márquez states that he conceded to take part in its creation as "it had a large dose of lunacy to make it seem like ours.
[3] Cepeda Samudio died in 1972, the year that his final collection of short stories, Los cuentos de Juana, was released, of lymphatic cancer, the same condition which his lifelong friend García Márquez was diagnosed with in 1999.