One Hundred Years of Solitude.

GARCIA MARQUEZ, Gabriel.

Item Number: 7214

New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1970.

First American edition of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magnum opus. Octavo, original green cloth with gilt lettering to the spine. Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa. Inscribed and dated by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 1981 (the year he won the Nobel Prize in literature) on the dedication page. Also signed by the translator Gregory Rabassa with the added opening sentence from this novel, “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. Gregory Rabassa.” Fine in a very good first issue dust jacket with the exclamation point at the end of the first paragraph on the front flap with a few closed tears and wear to the extremities. Jacket design by Guy Fleming. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box.

"One Hundred Years of Solitude chronicles the life of Macondo, a fictional town based in part of Garcia Marquez's hometown of Aracataca, Colombia, and seven generations of the founding family, the Buendias. He creates a complex world with characters and events that display the full range of human experience. For the reader, the pleasure of the novel derives from its fast-paced narrative, humor, vivid characters, and fantasy elements. In this 'magic realism', the author combines imaginative flights of fancy with social realism to give us images of levitating priests, flying carpets, a four-year-long rainstorm, and a young woman ascending to heaven while folding sheets" (NYPL Books of the Century 31).