Garcia Marquez would sign on to the young Cuban revolution as a journalist, working in Bogota and Havana for its news agency Prensa Latina, then later as the agency's correspondent in New York.
Garcia Marquez wrote the epic "One Hundred Years of Solitude" in 18 months, living first off loans from friends and then by having his wife pawn their things, starting with the car and furniture.
By the time he finished writing in September 1966, their belongings had dwindled to an electric heater, a blender and a hairdryer. His wife then pawned those remaining items so that he could mail the manuscript to a publisher in Argentina.
"I never made a copy -- that was the only one there was," he recalled.
When Garcia Marquez came home from the post office, his wife looked around and said, "We have no furniture left, we have nothing. We owe $5,000."
She need not have worried; all 8,000 copies of the first run sold out in a week.
President Clinton himself recalled in an AP interview in 2007 reading "One Hundred Years of Solitude" while in law school and not being able to put it down, not even during classes.
"I realized this man had imagined something that seemed like a fantasy but was profoundly true and profoundly wise," he said.
Garcia Marquez remained loyal to Castro even as other intellectuals lost patience with the Cuban leader's intolerance for dissent. The U.S. writer Susan Sontag accused Garcia Marquez in 2005 of complicity by association in Cuban human rights violations. But others defended him, saying Garcia Marquez had persuaded Castro to help secure freedom for political prisoners.
Garcia Marquez's politics caused the United States to deny him entry visas for years. After a 1981 run-in with Colombia's government in which he was accused of sympathizing with M-19 rebels and sending money to a Venezuelan guerrilla group, he moved to Mexico City, where he lived most of the time for the rest of this life.
Garcia Marquez famously feuded with Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, who punched Garcia Marquez in a 1976 fight outside a Mexico City movie theater. Neither man ever publicly discussed the reason for the fight.
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