Nobel laureate Garcia Marquez dies at 87
MEXICO CITY — Gabriel Garcia Marquez, widely considered the most important Spanishlanguage writer since Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th century, died at home in Mexico City on Thursday. He was 87.
The Mexican government said Garcia Marquez died at 2 p.m. A gray hearse escorted by dozens of police vehicles left the author’s home about three hours later.
A journalist first who turned to fiction writing later and won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Colombian native achieved a level of literary celebrity that spawned comparisons to Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. Widely known as “Gabo,” he became a hero to the left as an early ally of Fidel Castro and a critic of Washington’s interventions from Vietnam to Chile.
His flamboyant and melancholy fictional works, including “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” “Love in the Time of Cholera” and “Autumn of the Patriarch,” outsold everything published in Spanish except the Bible.
The epic 1967 novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” sold more than 50 million copies in more than 25 languages.
The first sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude has become a famous opening line: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
He was literature’s leading practitioner of magical realism, the fictional blending of the everyday with fantastical elements such as a man trailed by a cloud of yellow butterflies.
Accepting the Nobel in 1982, he described Latin America as a “source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune.”
“A thousand years of solitude and sadness because of the death of the greatest Colombian of all time!” Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said on Twitter. “Such giants never die.”