Gabriel García Márquez: 1927-2014

Americas Society is saddened to learn of the passing of Colombian author and journalist Gabriel García Márquez. Considered one of the greatest Latin American and Spanish-language writers in history, he died on April 17 at the age of 87 in Mexico City.

We are honored that our Literature Department supported the first translation of what many consider García Márquez's master work, Cien Años de Soledad, published in 1967. The Americas Society, then known as the Center for Inter-American Relations, provided assistance for Gregory Rabassa's translation, titled One Hundred Years of Solitude and released in 1970. Translated into over 30 languages, the book went on to sell over 30 million copies worldwide. 

García Márquez won the Nobel Prize in 1982 "for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts." During his acceptance speech, he spoke of Latin America, saying: "We, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of...a new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth."

His acclaimed works include Love in the Time of Cholera, Autumn of the Patriarch, and Chronicle of a Death Foretold. In addition to being a fiction writer, García Márquez—affectionately known as "Gabo"—was an accomplished journalist and author of News of a Kidnapping. 

Image: Cover of the first translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude.