Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez has been one of the major novelists of the twentieth century in Latin America and has remained a writer of continuing interest well into the twenty-first. From an early age, he was interested in modernizing the traditional literature of his native Colombia, and participating in the Western tradition of modernism that fascinated an entire generation of writers across Latin America. An ardent reader of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, and Jorge Luis Borges from an early age, he began writing his own version of Faulknerian fiction in the 1950s, his ‘cycle of Macondo’ (a set of fictions centered on the invented town of Macondo) culminating in the novel Cien años de soledad (1967). That work has made his name virtually synonymous with ‘magic realism’ throughout the world.

García Márquez is also known as a public intellectual and political voice and has been committed from an early age to social, economic, and political change in Latin America. He stated in his Nobel Address that ‘the interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary’. In his lifetime, his understanding of these patterns has been shaped by his having experienced the violence of the civil war in Colombia known as ‘La Violencia’: the dictatorships in Colombia of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla and in Venezuela of Marcos Pérez Jiménez. Some of this political experience, as well as the presence of the United Fruit Company in the coastal region of Colombia in the early twentieth century, has, as we shall see, informed his writing.

This book is intended to be the most complete study to date of the fiction of García Márquez. It offers discussion and analysis of many facets of his writing: as a traditionalist who draws from classic Western texts, as a modernist committed to modernizing the conservative literary tradition of Colombia and Latin America, as an internationally recognized major writer of the 1960s Boom, as the key figure in popularizing what has been called ‘magic realism’, and, finally, as a modernist who has occasionally found uses for some of the strategies of the postmodern.