The Colombian novelist who took the tall tales of his grandmother's kitchen and the violent, dreamlike history of Latin America and spun them into one of the most beloved novels of his age. With One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) he crowned the Latin American Boom and carried magical realism to the world, won the Nobel Prize in 1982, and became, by wide reckoning, one of the most widely read Latin American writers in history — a figure of near-saintly standing in the region whose lifelong friendship with Fidel Castro drew lasting criticism he never disowned.
An old woman tells a boy the most outlandish things — a man trailed everywhere by yellow butterflies, a young woman who rises into the sky while holding bedsheets — and she tells them in the same flat, unsurprised voice she uses for the price of bread. Decades later Gabriel García Márquez said this was the secret of how to write. In 1967 he published One Hundred Years of Solitude, the saga of a family and a town called Macondo, told in that calm voice that makes the miraculous and the ordinary one fabric. It sold in the tens of millions across dozens of languages, crowned a generation of Latin American writers, and won him the Nobel Prize in 1982. "Gabo" became one of the most beloved storytellers his continent had produced, and one whose loyalty to Fidel Castro never stopped troubling his admirers.