financially in order to create a work of art. Poverty loomed over Mozart while composing works that revolutionized music, over Edgar Allan Poe while writing short stories that transformed modern literature, over Picasso while striving to sell his first cubist paintings, and over García Márquez while writing One Hundred Years of Solitude. Yet this myth of the creative genius cornered by economic hardship is more than a familiar story: it is a social pattern that ends up magnifying the difficulties that artists faced while creating their work. And as myths of this kind grow over time, they also obscure important details about how a work of art was really conceived and hence make it more challenging to explain how it turned into a classic.
The story of how One Hundred Years of Solitude actually came into being is even more fascinating than the legends and myths that surround this novel. When it was released in 1967, neither the publisher nor the author expected much of it. They knew, as publishing giant Alfred A. Knopf once said, “many a novel is dead the day it is published.”2 Yet something unexpected happened. This novel did not die the day of its publication. Instead, it started to live what would prove to be a long life. The story of how this novel about a remote Caribbean town has become the most famous work of Latin American literature and a global classic is spellbinding. Ascent to Glory seeks to tell this story, using especially numerous new sources, including the ones kept in García Márquez’s personal archives.
At the heart of One Hundred Years of Solitude is the tale of the Buendía family and their town of Macondo, which was the scene of natural catastrophes, civil wars, and magical incidents. In the end, as prophesized by a manuscript that generations of Buendías tried to decipher, a biblical hurricane destroyed Macondo after the last Buendía was born with a pig’s tail. To readers familiar with the global success of the novel since its publication in 1967, choosing it as the subject of this book comes as no surprise. One Hundred Years of Solitude is the work of Latin American literature par excellence. It is also the most read literary work in Spanish after Don Quixote. It has been translated into forty-nine languages, has sold over fifty million copies, and is listed among the top thirty best-selling literary works of all time. A 2009 survey among international writers published in the British newspaper the Guardian ranked it as the novel that has most influenced world literature over the past three decades. This influence still continues and is largely due to the novel’s association with magical realism, a style that mixes stories of ordinary life with magical events. This style has now expanded into a global genre with its own art market.
Magical realism is present in award-winning works and international best sellers such as The House of the Spirits by the Chilean writer Isabel Allende; Pig Tales by the French author Marie Darrieussecq; Big Breasts and Wide Hips by the Chinese author and Nobel laureate Mo Yan; Midnight’s Children by the Indian Salman Rushdie; Illywhacker by the Australian Peter Carey; The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by the Japanese Haruki Murakami; and Beloved by the American author and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison. The influence of magical realism has grown so vast in literature that scholars and common readers use the term to talk about literary works written in different countries and decades before the birth of One Hundred Years of Solitude, books such as The Master and Margarita by the Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov; Their Eyes Were Watching God by the American Zora Neale Hurston; or Ficciones by the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges. The reach of magical realism extends beyond literature. In cinema, this style is present in Hollywood productions, international blockbusters, Oscar winners, and indie movies such as Life of Pi, Amen, Birdman, The Shape of Water, Amélie, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and Beasts of the Southern Wild. In these and other works of art, One Hundred Years of Solitude is customarily (and incorrectly) credited as the founding work of magical realism, an attribution that helps to maintain the global visibility of this novel generation after generation.
The global impact of One Hundred Years of Solitude now extends beyond its magical realist style. One finds the presence of this novel in paintings, operas, ballets, plays, cartoons, video games, social media, web pages, newspaper articles, blogs, scholarly publications, songs, drinks, household objects, public parks, restaurants, peoples’ names, and even distant celestial bodies. The 2020s started with the announcement that Macondo is the name of the star HD 93083, located about ninety-one light years away from the Earth. Orbiting this star is the extrasolar planet HD 93083 b, also known as Melquíades, a character in the novel.
Not coincidentally, one of the most familiar characteristics of the classic is its unstoppable power to be a part of our lives, often without our permission and often in formats that are different from the one set by its creator. One Hundred Years of Solitude is linked to one of the worst environmental accidents in history: the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 took place in a prospect called Macondo. If a classic is a social institution that shapes the taste and actions of artists, art industry gatekeepers, influencers, and consumers across generations, nations, and cultures, then One Hundred Years of Solitude has become one. Its total number of readers forms a community that, if it were a country, would be among the thirty most populous in the world.
THIS BOOK AT A GLANCE
I wrote Ascent to Glory for two kinds of readers: first, fans of One Hundred Years of Solitude and García Márquez in general and, second, sociologists, historians, and literary scholars. To both audiences, this book offers a study of the novel’s conception, best-selling success, and consecration as a classic. Fans will find detailed answers to many of their questions about how the novel was written and how it became so famous globally. Sociologists, historians, and literary scholars will find that this book throws new light on key issues in their disciplines, such as value and cultural brokerage, genius and the universal, and power and world literature. (For more details on these and other issues, see the appendix.)
Chapters 1 through 4 cover the years 1920 through 1967. Using rare and new evidence from the García Márquez archives and libraries in five countries, these chapters examine the four decades prior to the novel’s publication. They study the ideas, conventions, styles, objects, people, and organizations that made One Hundred Years of Solitude imaginable as a work of art in the first place. When García Márquez was born, the artistic principles of Latin Americanism and cosmopolitanism were spreading in Latin America, and years later they compelled him and his contemporaries to imagine and write their works as region-spanning Latin American literature. These principles were central to imagine his novel but not enough to produce it. The fate of One Hundred Years of Solitude could have been completely different without the rapid modernization of the Spanish-language book industry in the 1960s. Due to this booming industry, the novel was part of an avalanche of literary works that began in 1962. Their success created a space of imagination, production, and reception; thanks to this space (or niche), One Hundred Years of Solitude easily entered the publishing market five years later as a best seller. But how did García Márquez actually write the novel? While struggling to put it on paper for seventeen years, he learned many professional skills and conventions over two decades of traveling in more than ten countries and after joining several groups of artists. Collaborators in Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Spain assisted him as he was writing it. When the novel was published, it became an instant hit. It was the new product of the modernizing Spanish-language book industry and of the successful trend known as the New Latin American Novel. And it was written by a skillful and well-connected Latin American author.
Yet being a best seller guarantees nothing long-term. A work of art, no matter how successful was at first, is not born a classic but rather becomes one. Chapters 5 through 7 show what happened to One Hundred Years of Solitude over the next six decades, from 1967 to 2020. These chapters analyze data from more than ninety countries and forty-five languages to explain its ascent to glory. For this ascent to happen, scores of cultural brokers had to intervene. They facilitate the circulation of the work of art from one culture, country, and generation to another. These brokers are more than the usual suspects,
