Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel Prize-winning author, dies at 87

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Colombian Nobel literature laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez meets with fans and reporters outside his Mexico City home on March 6, his 87th birthday. (Eduardo Verdugo / Associated Press)

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Gabriel Garcia Marquez, shown in Barcelona, Spain, in 2005, was a prolific writer. Among his best-loved works are “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” “Love in the Time of Cholera,” “The General in His Labyrinth,” and “Chronicle of a Death Foretold.” (Cesar Rangel / AFP/Getty Images)

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Gabriel Garcia Marquez talks with former President Bill Clinton in Cartagena, Colombia, in 2007. Clinton and Garcia Marquez knew each since at least 1994, when they attended a dinner party at William Styron’s house that Garcia Marquez later wrote about. They debated the works of William Faulkner. (Cesar Carrion / AFP/Getty Images)

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Gabriel Garcia Marquez and playwright Arthur Miller visiting Havana in 2000. The trip, which included a stopover at Hemingway’s Cuban home, was aimed at promoting contacts between intellectuals internationally. (Jose Goitia / Associated Press)

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Gabriel Garcia Marquez on stage after receiving the Nobel Prize for literature in Sweden in December 1982. (Bertil Ericson / AFP/Getty Images)

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Gabriel Garcia Marquez reads in Pasadena at the 52nd general assembly of the Inter-American Press Assn. in October 1996. Garcia Marquez was a journalist before he began writing novels. (Frank Wiese / Associated Press)

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Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Gabriel Garcia Marquez speak during a dinner at the annual cigar festival in Havana in 2000. “Fidel is the sweetest man I know,” Garcia Marquez told a journalist in 1977. And in a Playboy interview in 1983, the author said, “Ours is an intellectual friendship. It may not be widely known that Fidel is a very cultured man.” (Jose Goitia / Associated Press)

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Readers in Colombia were so eager to get copies of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novella “Memoria de mis putas tristes” (Memories of My Melancholy Whores) in 2004 that pirated copies were circulated early and its official publication date was moved up by a week. (Luis Acosta / AFP/Getty Images)

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Gabriel Garcia Marquez arrives in his hometown of Aracataca, Colombia, in 2007, his first visit after winning the Nobel Prize in literature 25 years before. (Jairo Castilla / Associated Press)

By Chris Kraul and Anne-Marie O’Connor

April 17, 2014 1:20 PM PT

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel Prize-winning Colombian novelist whose “One Hundred Years of Solitude” enchanted millions of readers around the world and popularized the emerging Latin American literary genre known as magic realism, has died. He was 87.

Garcia Marquez died Thursday at his home in Mexico City, Mexican media reported. A cause of death was not immediately annnounced, but Garcia Marquez had been in failing health for some time. He was released from the hospital just over a week ago.

The death in his home, accompanied by his wife and other members of his family, was confirmed by Rafael Tovar y de Teresa, president of the official Mexican cultural association. Tovar said he had spoken to the family.

An appreciation: Gabriel Garcia Marquez was more than magical realism

Garcia Marquez’s death represents the passing of one of the world’s greatest living authors, and the loss of a powerful public intellectual whose opinions on Cuba, military dictatorship and Latin American cultural autonomy made front-page news.

The news was met with an outpouring of grief and reverence for the writer known to his admirers simply as “Gabo,” and who was often compared to Hispanic literature’s other titan, “Don Quixote” author Miguel de Cervantes. More than any other author, Garcia Marquez fueled the post-World War II popularizing of Latin America literature known as the “Boom.”

“Being a contemporary of Gabo was like living in the time of Homer,” said Colombian writer Hector Abad Faciolince, who described “One Hundred Years” as Latin America’s first and only epic work of literature. ”In a mythic and poetic way, he explained our origins. His verbal imagination and creative force were astonishing.”

Garcia Marquez did not invent magic realism -- the blending of fantasy and outrageous facts “told with a straight face,” as he once put it. The style was pioneered by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, Mexico’s Juan Rulfo and Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges. But Garcia Marquez certainly burnished the technique with the publication of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” the tale of four generations of the Buendia family set in a backwater banana depot he christened Macondo but which was based on his birthplace Aracataca, near Colombia’s Caribbean coast.

Success came late to Garcia Marquez, his blockbuster 1967 novel published shortly before he turned 40. Until then he had scraped by as a newspaper reporter, advertising copywriter and screenwriter. He was so poor when he finished his big novel that he had to mail the manuscript to his Argentine publisher in two packages because he couldn’t afford to send it all at once.

But the subsequent growth of his global fame and influence leading up to and following his winning the 1982 Nobel Prize for literature was a phenomenon unsurpassed over the last century by any writer with the possible exception of Ernest Hemingway.

Garcia Marquez’s stature, journalistic instincts and innate fascination with leaders and the power they wield helped him forge friendships with world figures from Presidents Bill Clinton of the U.S. and Francois Mitterrand of France to dictators Fidel Castro of Cuba and Omar Torrijos of Panama.

A complete obituary will follow at latimes.com/obits.

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Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson in Mexico City contributed to this report.