46
(A) García Márquez’s real-life political leanings are decidedly revolutionary, even communist: he is a friend of Fidel Castro.
(B) García Márquez’s native town of Aracataca is the inspiration for much of his fiction, and readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude may recognize many parallels between the real-life history of García Márquez’s hometown and the history of the fictional town of Macondo.
(C) García Márquez’s masterpiece, however, appeals not just to Latin American experiences, but to larger questions about human nature.
(D) Latin America once had a thriving population of native Aztecs and Incas, but, slowly, as European explorers arrived, the native population had to adjust to the technology and capitalism that the outsiders brought with them.
(E) When One Hundred Years of Solitude was published in his native Spanish in 1967, as Cien años de soledad, García Márquez achieved true international fame; he went on to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.