He divided the manuscript into two halves and mailed just one half.īack home, he looked at the pages still in his hands and discovered that he made a big mistake. But the bankrupt writer discovered that he did not have enough money to send the whole manuscript.
He went to the post office to mail the manuscript to a possible publisher in Argentina. Nothing could stop him.Įighteen months later, he emerged from his studio with a completed manuscript. He fell behind on rent payments, lived on the generosity of his friends, sold his car, and pawned his wife’s jewelry and his typewriter. Debts skyrocketed as months of writing passed. He quit the job that supported his family and locked himself up in his studio in order to finish the novel.
The writer turned his car around and rushed back home to Mexico City. Right there on the road, in a stroke of brilliant insight, the writer came up with the first sentence of a novel that would change world literature: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” A new book by Ransom Center guest curator and Whitman College assistant professor Álvaro Santana-Acuña– Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic (Columbia University Press, August 2020), explores how the novel achieved success and what it reveals about how a work of literature becomes a classic.ĭuring the summer of 1965, as an unknown writer was driving from Mexico City to Acapulco for a vacation with his wife and two children, a cow crossed the road in front of his car. Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, was published on May 30, 1967. Explore the Harry Ransom Center, search digital collections, or plan your visit.
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