One Hundred Years of Solitude - Biography and Publication

Biography and Publication

The Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez was one of the four Latin American novelists first included in the literary Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s; the other three writers were the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, the Argentine Julio Cortázar, and the Mexican Carlos Fuentes. One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) earned García Márquez international fame as a novelist of the Magical Realism movement within the literatures of Latin America.

As a metaphoric, critical interpretation of Colombian history, from foundation to contemporary nation, One Hundred Years of Solitude presents different national myths through the story of the Buendía Family, whose spirit of adventure places them amidst the important actions of Colombian historical events — such as the nineteenth-century arguments for and against the Liberal political reformation of a colonial way of life; the arrival of the railway to a mountainous country; the Thousand Days War (Guerra de los Mil Días, 1899–1902); the corporate hegemony of the United Fruit Company ("American Fruit Company" in the story); the cinema; the automobile; and the military massacre of striking workers as government–labour relations policy.