The story of One Hundred Years of Solitude begins, like all the best stories, with a road trip. In January 1965, Gabriel Garcia Marquez was driving his family from Mexico City to Acapulco for a vacation when the first sentence arrived, fully formed, in his head: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." He turned the car around, went home, and sat down at his typewriter. He did not emerge for eighteen months.

His wife Mercedes sold the car, pawned her jewelry, and ran up credit at the butcher, the baker, and the landlord. She slid pages of the manuscript under the door and handed him coffee. When the book was finished, they could not afford to mail the complete manuscript to the publisher in Buenos Aires. They sent half. Then they pawned the heater and sent the rest.

The novel that nearly bankrupted them became the most important work of fiction published in Spanish since Don Quixote. One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the Buendia family across seven generations in the fictional town of Macondo -- a place where the dead return to give advice, a priest levitates after drinking hot chocolate, and a rain of yellow flowers falls from the sky when the patriarch dies. It is a novel in which the magical and the mundane coexist without contradiction, because Garcia Marquez understood that this is how people actually experience life in Latin America, where the extraordinary is woven into the texture of daily existence.

He called this approach "magical realism," though he insisted there was nothing magical about it. He had learned to tell stories from his grandmother in Aracataca, Colombia, the small Caribbean town where he was born in 1927 and which became the model for Macondo. His grandmother reported miracles and disasters in exactly the same deadpan tone, and the young Gabriel absorbed the lesson: the secret to making the impossible believable is to narrate it with absolute conviction and no fanfare.

He was also a journalist of formidable skill, a friend of Fidel Castro (a friendship that cost him credibility with many intellectuals), and a love-letter writer of legendary devotion. Love in the Time of Cholera, his other masterpiece, is a novel about a man who waits fifty-one years, nine months, and four days for the woman he loves -- and the waiting, not the consummation, is the point.

He won the Nobel Prize in 1982 and accepted it wearing a white linen liqui-liqui, the traditional Caribbean suit, rather than a tuxedo. He died in 2014, in Mexico City, having given the world a mythology so complete that Macondo feels more real than most actual places on a map.