In a career spanning more than 60 years, Mr. García Márquez wrote some of the Spanish language’s most revered books, many of which became best sellers in the U.S.
They included “Autumn of the Patriarch,” about a Caribbean tyrant; “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” which painstakingly narrates a small-town murder; “Love in the Time of Cholera,” about two lovers who wait half a century to reunite, and “The General in his Labyrinth,” detailing independence hero Simón Bolívar’s inglorious last days.
Mr. García Márquez was also an accomplished journalist, whose lyrical, deeply reported stories first caught the eye of readers in Colombia’s chilly mountain capital, Bogotá, in the early 1950s.
He later became renowned not only his profiles of presidents and despots but for the real-life close ties he cultivated with leaders ranging from Fidel Castro to Bill Clinton to François Mitterrand.
Mr. García Márquez found a certain thrill in hob-knobbing with the powerful, noted his friends. “I still can’t get used to the idea that my friends become presidents, nor have I yet overcome my susceptibility to being impressed by government palaces,” he once wrote in an article, as recounted in Gerald Martin’s 2009 biography, “Gabriel García Márquez: A Life.”
Proudly leftist and anti-imperialist, he used his fame to try to lobby for Latin American unity and an end to American meddling in the region.