The colonel’s stories of massacres, feuds and duels, the solitude of Aracataca, even his introduction to ice all found their way into García Márquez’s books. The colonel himself is a recognizable figure in the author’s fiction, notably as Colonel Aureliano Buendía in “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
Writing about his grandfather’s death in his 2002 autobiography, “Living to Tell the Tale,” Mr. García Márquez said that “a piece of me had died with him.”
“But I also believe,” Mr. García Márquez wrote, “without the slightest doubt, that in that moment [when he died] I was already a beginning writer who only needed to learn to write.”
When he did learn, Aracataca, with its infernal heat and almond trees, was transformed into the magical town of Macondo in “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
The novel’s historic sweep and timeless writing helped Mr. García Márquez win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. Though Mr. García Márquez has said “Autumn of the Patriarch” was his best book and readers gravitated to “Love in the Time of Cholera,” it was “One Hundred Years of Solitude” that first cemented his fame.
Some critics in Latin America said it was the most important book in the Spanish language since Don Quixote, and the American author and critic William Kennedy called the novel “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.”
Mr. García Márquez was self-deprecating about the book in some interviews, saying that he didn’t understand why it was so celebrated. But in reality, the book’s story arc percolated in his head for years, as they did for many of his books.
“I know the last sentence of the book before I sit down to write it,” the author explained. “When I sit down I have the book in my head, as if I’d read it, because I’ve been thinking about it for years.”
—Sara Schaefer Muñoz contributed to this article.
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