Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014)

April 17, 2014

Posted by Joshua Rothman

Gabriel García Márquez, the winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature, died on Thursday, at the age of eighty-seven. The New Yorker was lucky enough to publish a number of his short stories, starting with “The Sea of Lost Time,” in 1974. In 1999, Jon Lee Anderson wrote a Profile of the novelist, called “The Power of García Márquez.” The article focussed on García Márquez’s unique role in Colombia, and in Latin America more generally:

“Gabo” is what García Márquez is called by nearly everyone in the Spanish-speaking world. That or el maestro, or, in Colombia, Nuestro Nobel, our Nobel Prize winner.

But, of course, García Márquez was special to the rest of us, too: few writers are so intimately associated with a literary style or an imaginative world. You can see everything that García Márquez published in The New Yorker here; his story “The Autumn of the Patriarch” (an excerpt from the novel of the same name) is available to everyone online. In “The Challenge,” from 2003, a Personal History about his early days as a writer, García Márquez recalls seeing his first story in print: “I read it in a single breath, hiding in my room, my heart pounding.” We’ve unlocked “The Challenge” as well.
Above: Gabriel García Márquez in Cartagena, Colombia; February 20, 1991. Photograph by Ulf Andersen/Getty.