Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel laureate famous for writing "Love in the Time of Cholera" and "One Hundred Years of Solitude," has died at home in Mexico City according to the Hollywood Reporter. Garcia Marquez's death was confirmed by two people close to the family. Marquez was 87. He had been considered one of the most popular Spanish-language writers alive and had achieved a high level of literary celebrity during his 87 years of life.
His most famous books include Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera and Autumn of the Patriarch, as well as the epic 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude which sold more than 50 million copies in more than 25 languages. Biographer Gerald Martin told The Associated Press that One Hundred Years of Solitude was "the first novel in which Latin Americans recognized themselves, that defined them, celebrated their passion, their intensity, their spirituality and superstition, their grand propensity for failure." His works have been adapted multiple times for films in both English and Spanish. His most notable English film was 2007's Love in the Time of Cholera, directed by Mike Newell(Four Weddings and a Funeral) with a screenplay by Ron Harwood (The Pianist). He leaves behind an extensive breadth of Spanish movie work, including credits in short films and miniseries. He wrote the screenplay for El ano de la peste (The Year of the Plague), which won an Ariel Award (Mexico's Oscar). Garcia Marquez also served as the executive director of the Film Institute in Havana, Cuba, and in the 1980s, he was the head of the Latin American Film Foundation.
When he accepted the Nobel Prize in 1982, Garcia Marquez described Latin America as a "source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable."
