Gabriel García Márquez

A giant of both Latin American and world literature, Gabriel García Márquez embraced a world of lovely, lyrical magic and despotic politics in such novels as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) and The General in His Labyrinth (1989). García Márquez's work appealed to a wide demographic, entrancing literary-minded critics and casual readers alike, which helped to make him one of the most widely read and admired literary figures of the 20th century, on par with such legendary authors as Dickens and Tolstoy, whose own work was greatly admired by García Márquez. He spent his early career as a journalist before political trouble sent him to Europe in the late 1950s; there, he began writing fiction, but it would take another decade before he would release what most readers considered to be his master work, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Inspired by the stories and experiences of his grandparents, the novel brought readers into a world where fantasy and stark reality co-existed in a mythical South American town based in part on his own childhood home. The novel was a colossal success, selling some 30 million copies over the course of García Márquez's lifetime. Though he was initially concerned that Solitude would eclipse his subsequent work, García Márquez remained exceptionally popular throughout the next four decades, during which he netted a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 while publishing numerous novels, short stories, screenplays and non-fiction works. A profound influence upon a generation of writers and other artists, Gabriel García Márquez cast a towering shadow over the history of 20th century fiction from both his native Latin America and throughout the world by the time of his April 2014 death.