Gabriel García Márquez wrote the first line of One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1965 — and promptly turned the car around. He had been driving his family to a vacation when he understood that the novel had begun wrong. So he stopped, went home, and sat down to write.
He was born in Aracataca, Colombia, in 1927, and raised by his grandfather, a colonel who told stories of the civil war as though they were the most ordinary thing in the world. That is what "magical realism" became: the miraculous, delivered in an everyday tone.
One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967): seven generations of the Buendía family in the invented town of Macondo. Time moves in circles. Love, war, the banana company, oblivion. The novel has been translated into forty languages and has sold fifty million copies.
Love in the Time of Cholera, The Autumn of the Patriarch, No One Writes to the Colonel. The Nobel Prize came in 1982. He died in Mexico City in 2014.