Literary pioneer Márquez dies
Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, whose “One Hundred Years of Solitude” established him as a giant of 20th-century literature, died yesterday at his home in Mexico City.
He was 87.
His death was confirmed by Cristobal Pera, his former editor at Random House.
Márquez, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, wrote fiction rooted in a mythical Latin American landscape of his own creation, but his appeal was universal.
His books were translated into dozens of languages. He was among a select roster of canonical writers -- Dickens, Tolstoy and Hemingway among them -- who were embraced both by critics and by a mass audience.
Márquez was considered the supreme exponent, if not the creator, of the literary genre known as magic realism, in which the miraculous and the real converge.
Magic realism, he said, sprang from Latin America's history of vicious dictators and romantic revolutionaries, of long years of hunger, illness and violence.
“One Hundred Years of Solitude” would sell more than 20 million copies. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda called it “the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since 'Don Quixote.' ” The novelist William Kennedy hailed it as “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.”
Márquez made no claim to have invented magic realism; he pointed out that elements of it had appeared before in Latin American literature. But no one before him had used the style with such artistry, exuberance and power. Magic realism would soon inspire writers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Suffering from lymphatic cancer, which was diagnosed in 1999, Márquez devoted most of his subsequent writing to his memoirs.
In July 2012, his brother, Jaime, was quoted as saying that Márquez had senile dementia and had stopped writing.
Besides his wife, Mercedes, he is survived by two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.
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