Gabriel García Márquez

Colombian · b. 1927

Gabriel García Márquez turned the car around on the road to Acapulco when One Hundred Years of Solitude arrived in his head complete, then wrote for 18 months while his wife pawned the appliances. The Colombian journalist's magic realism won the 1982 Nobel Prize and gave Latin America its defining literary voice — miracles in deadpan, atrocities like fairy tales.