Marquez, master of magical realism, no more

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian author whose beguiling stories of love and longing brought Latin America to life for millions of readers and put magical realism on the literary map, passed away on Thursday. He was 87. A prolific writer who started out as a newspaper reporter, Marquez's masterpiece was "One Hundred Years of Solitude," a dream-like, dynastic epic that helped him win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. Marquez died at his home in Mexico City. He had returned home from hospital last week after a bout of pneumonia. Known affectionately to friends and fans as "Gabo," Garcia Marquez was Latin America's best-known and most beloved author and his books have sold in the tens of millions. Although he produced stories, essays and several short novels such as "Leaf Storm" and "No One Writes to the Colonel" in the 1950s and early 1960s, he struggled for years to find his voice as a novelist. But he then found it in dramatic fashion with “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” an instant success on publication in 1967 that was dubbed "Latin America's Don Quixote" by many, including late Mexican author Carlos Fuentes, according to a news agency.