It’s the birthday of literary giant and purveyor of magical realism Gabriel García Márquez, whose novels and stories have been lauded by critics and beloved by millions of readers. Best known for his masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. His writing is freaky brilliant, and I do mean freaky.

García Márquez was born in Aracataca, Columbia, in 1927, and spent the first years of his life with his grandparents. Aracataca is a river town in a tropical region and was a source of inspiration for the mythical village Macondo from One Hundred Years; his grandfather, a retired colonel, was inspiration for the novel’s main character, Colonial Buendía. García Márquez studied law but became a journalist, offended Columbia’s dictator Gen. Gustavo Rojas Pinilla with a report in 1955, and had to flee. By then he was already writing fiction: Leaf Storm (1955), No One Writes to the Colonel (1961), In Evil Hour (1962). He spent time in Paris, Barcelona, New York City, and with his wife, Mercedes, moved to Mexico City in 1961. For several years he didn’t write fiction at all, and then was inspired to write One Hundred Years.

One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, who founded the isolated town of Macondo; the town starts out utopian, but solitude leads to selfishness and ultimately destruction, a fictional history that parallels the history of colonial Latin America. It’s magical realism, so fantastic things are constantly being reported by García Márquez in a completely matter-of-fact way that makes them weirdly believable. (I think you either love magical realism or you hate it. You either love it when it rains and rains and rains for five years nonstop, you love it when dead bodies fail to decompose and flowers fall from the sky and the occasional ghost shows up, or you find it all irritating. I’m of the former. This is a wonderful, wild read.)

Other works by García Márquez include Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981; a fascinating read and much quicker than One Hundred Years); Love in the Time of Cholera (1985); The General in His Labyrinth (1989); and many more.

García Márquez was strongly leftist and became best buds with Fidel Castro around the time he published the novel The Autumn of the Patriach (1975); this was one reason the U.S. refused to give him a travel visa until Bill Clinton invited him to Martha’s Vineyard in 1995. Many intellectuals, human rights advocates, and Latin Americans have found his association with Castro and his silent acceptance of that regime to be a troubling moral failing, though García Márquez claimed that their friendship resulted in many prisoners being freed.

García Márquez was diagnosed with cancer in 1999 but still published Memories of My Melancholy Whores in 2004. He had dementia in his final years and died at 87 in Mexico City.

Have a brilliantly pleasant Tuesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.