Gabriel Garcia Marquez achieved international acclaim with his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. This is a novel with a broad view of human nature, using the landscape of a town and its history as background. The novel tells the history of the town of Macondo. The novel covers that history through six generations of the descendants of the founder of the town, JosT Arcadio Buendia, and that history is also the history of a national decline. Marquez uses the town of Macondo as a smaller representation of his own Colombia, but he also uses it as a reflection of world history.
Marquez was born in 1928. He attended law school, and his first story, "The Third Resignation," was published in 1947. He abandoned his legal studies in 1950 and wrote for a liberal newspaper under the name "Septimus." His first novel, Leaf Storm, was published in 1955. In 1960 he moved to New York City to manage a press office, and a year later he left and traveled through Mexico. One Hundred Years of Solitude was published in 1966 and received a number of awards, as well as becoming a best-seller in different countries. The novel first appeared in English in 1970 (Janes ix-xii).
Critics generally agree that there was a significant change in the quality and direction of the Spanish-American novel in the 1940s. The novel before this functioned within the boundaries of the realist tradition. The modern novel arrived in the late 1940s deriving techniques from Proust, Joyce, Dos Passos, Woolf, and Faulkner. One new characteristic in Latin American fiction was the insistence on the right of invention, and reality was no longer the sole source:
Far from an isolated instance of brilliance, one may place Garcia Marquez's work squarely within this tradition of Latin-American fiction, the insistence on the right of invention being his trademark (Williams 3).
A simple statement of the plot does not do justice to the structure and complexity of...