Gabriel García Márquez

García Márquez, Gabriel (1928- ), Colombian novelist. Winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in literature, he first achieved world prominence in 1967 with One Hundred Years of Solitude. Set in the imaginary jungle town of Macondo, this novel tells of the decline of the town and the Buendía family. It perpetuates and brings to its fullest literary expression a literary style known as magical realism. Macondo was also the setting for two earlier works, Leaf Storm (1955) and No One Writes to the Colonel (1968). Later novels include The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), a portrait of an aged and isolated dictator; Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a story of love, jealousy, and murder; and Love in the Time of Cholera (1988), a love story. The General in his Labyrinth (1989), a novel about the South American 19th-century revolutionary Simon Bolívar, generated great controversy.