This Colombian novelist, short story writer and journalist was born March 6, 1928 near the Caribbean seacoast of Colombia in a small, remote town called Aracataca, which became the model in his imaginative mind for the mythical town of Macondo in his novel, "Cíen Años de Soledad" -- translated into English as "One Hundred Years of Solitude." He lives in Barcelona today, still writing, working on what many hope will be another masterpiece like "Solitude" -- which is deemed by many critics to be one of the great novels of the 20th century. Garcia Márquez started out like the great American novelist, Ernest Hemingway, as a newspaper reporter, then a columnist and film critic, while he labored hard -- and obscurely -- for a good many years on his fiction. But he'd been poor as a child; he could also live in poverty as a struggling writer, and develop his own distinctive style of fabulous realism. He became a foreign correspondent, lived in Paris for more than three years, flirted with Communism, worked for the Castro news agency in Colombia and Havana and New York, then, in the mid-1960s, moved to Mexico with his wife and two children, where he worked as a screenwriter (collaborating for a time with Carlos Fuentes), and, then holed up for 18 months, living on borrowed money, to write "Solitude." That novel is a comic masterpiece, both a family saga and a history of modern Colombia, even of the entire continent of Latin America. It is also an epic myth of all human experience. Read it.

Model: Garcia Márquez has coupled a fertile imagination with a virtue not notably esteemed in our youth culture: hard work. If you want to succeed, you have to be lucky. But you will note, from the example of men like Garcia Márquez, that the harder you work, the luckier you will get.

Hook, line and sinker. If you were born on March 6 you have a magnetic attraction to all things beautiful: music, drama, art, people, situations. You walk through life minding your own business until something or someone pretty catches your eye. One look, however, and you're you're hooked. Ruled by the number 6 and the planet Venus, you can be sentimental and impressionable.

A slave to your senses. You live in a world of tastes, textures, sounds, sights and smells which raise your spirits and sometimes overwhelms you. You can become a slave to your desires and attractions, hoping to get ever closer, to merge with them. Consequently, your work and personal life may be disrupted.

Biased senses. You tend to project your own idealized picture out on the world, or maybe they're just strong expectations. You often don't see what is really there but what you wish to see. This may seem irrational, but it fulfills a genuine need. We all need to feel we live in a perfect, orderly world. You may be trying harder than others.

Mirror, mirror. You might have attracting powers of your own, causing others to admire and even adore you. Maturing March 6 people try to understand and control this power to influence their success in career and personal life.

Some advice: Learn to exercise control over your attractions. Don't be so let down when you find the world is not perfect after all. There's more to life that perfection and beauty.

Also born on this day:
Michelangelo (painted Sistine Chapel) Gabriel García Márquez (Nobel Prize-winning writer) Cyrano de Bergerac (Spanish soldier known for his nose) Valentina Tereshkova (cosmonaut, first woman in space) Ring Lardner (short story writer) Wes Montgomery (jazz guitarist) Dame Kiri Te Kanawa (New Zealand operatic soprano) Rob Reiner (actor, director) Mary Wilson (singer, Supremes) Lou Costello (comedic actor) Dick Fosbury (Olympic gold high jumper) Ann Curtis (Olympic gold swimmer) Willy Stargell (Pirates baseball outfielder) Tom Foley (US congressman, Washington)