Gabriel Garcia Marquez spent years as a struggling journalist before writing One Hundred Years of Solitude, a novel that invented an entire literary genre and earned him the Nobel Prize. Magical realism — the seamless blending of the fantastic and the mundane — was not a literary trick but Marquez’s attempt to capture the way Latin Americans actually experienced reality.

This episode traces Marquez from his grandmother’s storytelling in Aracataca through his journalism career, the eighteen months of feverish writing that produced his masterpiece, and his complicated friendship with Fidel Castro that divided the literary world.

• How his grandmother’s deadpan supernatural storytelling became the foundation of magical realism
• The journalism years and the real events that fed his fiction
• The writing of One Hundred Years of Solitude and its explosive worldwide impact
• Marquez’s controversial friendship with Castro and its cost to his literary reputation