Screenshot of the Youtube video.

Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian novelist and journalist who inspired many a mind to appreciate magical realism in words and the world around them, died today at home in Mexico City.

Mr. García Márquez learned he had lymphatic cancer in 1999, and a brother said in 2012 that he had developed senile dementia.

Mr. García Márquez, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, wrote fiction rooted in a mythical Latin American landscape of his own creation, but his appeal was universal. His books were translated into dozens of languages. He was among a select roster of canonical writers — Dickens, Tolstoy and Hemingway among them — who were embraced both by critics and by a mass audience.  Read the full NYT piece.

Please send in your favorite lines from his work.

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I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still here.

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2 Comments

  1. “We are so peaceful that none of us has died even of a natural death,” he said. “You can see that we still don’t have any cemetery.”

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  2. ‘Tell him,’ the colonel said, smiling, ‘that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.”

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