Parts of this myth are true and other parts of it are not. This story about how this Colombian author conceived One Hundred Years of Solitude is in reality a fascinating myth, now passed on from generation to generation. Gabriel García Márquez Papers, Harry Ransom Center. A photograph of Gabriel García Márquez in his studio, ca. The writer was Gabriel García Márquez and the novel was One Hundred Years of Solitude ( Cien años de Soledad). What a terrible way to present the novel that had taken him so much effort to write! Luckily, the pages that he sent astonished the publisher, who knew that the novel would be a great success and hurried to offer the writer a publishing contract. He had just mailed the second half of the manuscript, not the first as he had intended. He divided the manuscript into two halves and mailed just one half.īack home, he looked at the pages still in his hands and discovered that he made a big mistake.
But the bankrupt writer discovered that he did not have enough money to send the whole manuscript. He went to the post office to mail the manuscript to a possible publisher in Argentina. Nothing could stop him.Įighteen months later, he emerged from his studio with a completed manuscript. He fell behind on rent payments, lived on the generosity of his friends, sold his car, and pawned his wife’s jewelry and his typewriter. Debts skyrocketed as months of writing passed. He quit the job that supported his family and locked himself up in his studio in order to finish the novel. The writer turned his car around and rushed back home to Mexico City. Right there on the road, in a stroke of brilliant insight, the writer came up with the first sentence of a novel that would change world literature: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” A new book by Ransom Center guest curator and Whitman College assistant professor Álvaro Santana-Acuña– Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic (Columbia University Press, August 2020), explores how the novel achieved success and what it reveals about how a work of literature becomes a classic.ĭuring the summer of 1965, as an unknown writer was driving from Mexico City to Acapulco for a vacation with his wife and two children, a cow crossed the road in front of his car. Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, was published on May 30, 1967. Explore the Harry Ransom Center, search digital collections, or plan your visit.
0 kommentar(er)
