The University of Texas at Austin has purchased the personal archive of the late Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez for an undisclosed amount.
The collection, which reportedly includes manuscripts, notebooks, photos, and letters belonging to the acclaimed journalist and author, was acquired by the Harry Ramson Center, a literary and cultural archive, museum, and library, according to the University of Texas’ website.
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“The University of Texas at Austin — with expertise in both Latin America and the preservation and study of the writing process — is the natural home for this very important collection. Our students, our faculty and the state of Texas will benefit from it for years to come,” Bill Powers, president of the university, said.
The archive contains original manuscript material from some of Garcia Marquez’s most famous books, including “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1967) and “Love in the Time of Cholera” (1985).
Some 2,000 letters, which include correspondence with writers like Graham Greene and Carlos Fuentes, are also in the collection acquired by the center.
Garcia Marquez, Colombia’s most renowned writer in recent history, died in April of this year in Mexico after a long fight against cancer.
MORE: Colombia literary legend Gabriel Garcia Marquez dies at 87
Garcia Marquez unleashed a worldwide boom in Spanish literature with his novel 100 Years of Solitude in the late 1960s.
Matching commercial success with critical acclaim, Garcia Marquez became a standard-bearer for Latin American letters, establishing a route for negotiations between guerrillas and the Colombian government, building a friendship with Fidel Castro, and maintaining a feud with fellow literature laureate Mario Vargas Llosa that lasted more than 30 years.
He was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1982, the Swedish Academy hailing fiction “in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent’s life and conflicts”.
Sources
- Nobel Prize-Winning Author Gabriel García Márquez’s Archive Acquired by The University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas)
- Archivo personal de García Márquez pasa a manos de la Universidad de Texas (El Espectador)
- “Gabo” goes to Texas (the city paper)
