Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel Prize-Winning Author, Dies

There are many online reports besides the first I posted. Here's another:
Obituary: Gabriel Garcia Marquez From the above link, for Mrrzy:

"...In 1965, the idea for the first chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude came to him while he was driving to Acapulco.

He turned the car, drove home and locked himself into his room with six packets of cigarettes a day for company. He emerged 18 months later to find his family $12,000 in debt. Fortunately, he had thirteen hundred pages of phenomenal best-selling text in his hands.

The novel's first printing in Spanish sold out within a week, and during the next thirty years One Hundred Years of Solitude sold more than twenty million copies and was translated into more than thirty languages.

The New York Times called it the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race..."