One Hundred Years of Solitude

By Gabriel García Márquez

Life

Book overview

One Hundred Years of Solitude (Spanish: Cien años de soledad) is a 1967 novel by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez that tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founds the town of Macondo, the metaphoric Colombia.

The magical realist style and thematic substance of One Hundred Years of Solitude established it as an important, representative novel of the literary Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, which was stylistically influenced by Modernism (European and North American) and the Cuban Vanguardia (Avant-Garde) literary movement.

One Hundred Years of Solitude was first published in Spanish in 1967; it has been translated into thirty-seven languages and has sold more than 30 million copies. The novel remains widely acclaimed, and is considered García Márquez's masterpiece.