in the world. For the first time in history, Latin American literature is starting to be acclaimed beyond the continental sphere.” And he added, “Thanks to Carpentier and Guimarães Rosa, to Onetti and Rulfo, as to Fuentes, Cortázar, and Vargas Llosa, the Latin American novel is beginning to take wing beyond its present linguistic limits. It is being translated, discovered, and discussed, as one hears, in Europe and the United States; the prizes and the editions are beginning to multiply. . . . Perhaps not since the introduction of the Russian novelists to nineteenth-century France, or of the modern Americans into postwar Europe, have similar potentialities existed, both for Latin American writers and for their potential readers overseas.”53
French critic Caillois expressed a similar opinion that year in an interview published in the world-famous newspaper Le Monde. “Latin American literature will be the great literature of tomorrow,” he said, “as Russian literature was the great literature at the end of the last century, [and] the literature of North America that of the years 25–40[;] now it is the time for Latin American literature. It is the one called to give us the masterpieces that we expect.” Months later, another prestigious periodical, the Times Literary Supplement, published an essay by English translator J. M. Cohen on the New Latin American Novel. Its opening statement stressed how much the novel in the region had changed: “Until the present decade [it was] at its best, provincial.” According to Cohen, writers from multiple generations were at the center of its transformation, such as Elena Garro, Vicente Leñero, Rulfo, Carpentier, Vargas Llosa, Onetti, Fuentes, Benedetti, García Márquez, and Cortázar, author of Hopscotch, “the first great novel of Spanish America.”54
Compared to what a handful of poorly distributed periodicals imagined in the 1920s, Latin American literature had traveled a long way by 1965. That year, when García Márquez started One Hundred Years of Solitude, the statements of writers and critics in periodicals read in more than twenty countries on three continents further convinced him that it was possible to imagine his ideas for a Caribbean story as something greater: a New Latin American Novel.
A COSMOPOLITAN AND LATIN AMERICAN NOVEL
The four decades during which literatura latinoamericana was imagined as a region-spanning literary tradition coincided with García Márquez’s birth, literary education, publication of his early works, and release of One Hundred Years of Solitude. As he was growing up, three generations of writers, critics, and gatekeepers of the publishing industry collaborated to create an audience for New Latin American Novels. One Hundred Years of Solitude benefited from this collaboration. Over two decades of compromise across generations with the principles of Latin Americanism and cosmopolitanism made it possible for a novel about a fictional and remote village in Colombia’s Caribbean region to be imagined. And imagined by its author, peers, critics, and first readers, not as a provincial work of art, but rather as a cosmopolitan reflection on Latin America’s history and its place in the Western cultural tradition.
One Hundred Years of Solitude gained even more visibility because it came out at the end of this period of literary effervescence, first known as the New Latin American Novel and later as the Latin American Boom. The avalanche of best-selling novels started in 1962 with the publication of Explosion in a Cathedral in Cuba, The Death of Artemio Cruz in Mexico, and Bomarzo in Argentina. It continued the following year with the release of The Time of the Hero in Spain and Hopscotch in Argentina. The avalanche of best-selling titles had just started. By 1967, these and other novels paved the way to label and market One Hundred Years of Solitude as a Latin American novel that could easily achieve regional and international success. Thus, the claim that this novel inaugurated the age of the New Latin American Novel or Latin American Boom is inaccurate.
Counterfactually, if One Hundred Years of Solitude had been published in the 1920s and 1930s, it would have passed as a work of regionalista literature, such as The Vortex by J. E. Rivera and Los Sangurimas by de la Cuadra. If García Márquez had written his novel in the 1940s and 1950s, it would have received little regional attention and no international acclaim, which occurred with Pedro Páramo, the modernist novella by Rulfo, and The Kingdom of This World, the magical realist novel by Carpentier. At best, readers and critics would have read One Hundred Years of Solitude as a precursor of the New Latin American Novel, just as they read Rulfo’s and Carpentier’s books.55
One Hundred Years of Solitude, however, came out in the 1960s, when a region-spanning literature was growing and attracting regional and international readers. Being at the center of this expansion was crucial to the novel’s early success. By April 1967, one month before its publication, critic Rodríguez Monegal wrote a note about it in Mundo Nuevo and said, “It does not represent the literature of a single Latin American nation, but of all Latin America,” like the work of Cortázar, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, Carpentier, and Sábato. A month later, the cover of Primera Plana magazine presented One Hundred Years of Solitude to its quarter of a million readers as “The Great Novel of America.”56
CONCLUSION
Latin American literature came into existence as a region-spanning tradition in a multiethnic, multilingual, and multinational niche. Its boundaries did not match those of the Latin American region or a national literary field. García Márquez imagined One Hundred Years of Solitude as a work of art inside this niche. Three generations of writers, critics, and publishers embraced the principles of cosmopolitanism and Latin Americanism, which helped imagine literary texts such as García Márquez’s novel. These generations’ collaboration started in earnest in the 1940s thanks to a cultural void that the Spanish Civil War and World War II left in the region. This void strengthened the region’s cultural autonomy by creating numerous regional and international organizations. With this cultural autonomy in full swing in the 1960s, attention to the region soared with the beginning of the Cuban Revolution. Latin America had had other moments of cultural effervescence that shaped the imagination of writers prior to the 1960s, such as modernismo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But unlike previous moments, the modernization of the Spanish-language publishing industry was a central factor that helped to move ideas for works of art beyond the stage of imagination into the stage of production. As the next chapter shows, One Hundred Years of Solitude was also a big beneficiary of this modernization.
THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY MODERNIZES
I waited for many years for a continental editor.
For me, it is like the achievement of an old dream.
—García Márquez after signing with Sudamericana Press1
When One Hundred Years of Solitude hit the market in 1967, the book industry in Spanish was booming. This situation was unimaginable for most writers and critics just a few years before. “How can literature exist,” writer Mario Vargas Llosa asked, “in countries where there are no publishing houses, where there are no literary publications, where if you want to publish a book you must finance it yourself?” Although he did not mention that book piracy was also rampant in these countries, his words describe well the situation of literary publishing in most of Latin America before the 1960s. Until then, the publishing industry was small and divided into national containers. For decades, low print runs weakened the circulation of literature in the region and beyond. In Mexico and Argentina, which published more titles than the rest of Latin American countries combined, the print run of most literary books was under five thousand copies. In Spain, it was three thousand.2
The standard literary book faced an even harsher reality on both sides of the Atlantic: print runs of one thousand copies. Of his first book, Los días
