Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of the modern classic One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, is one of the greatest and most popular writers of the late-twentieth century. As Gerald Martin tells the story of the author's fascinating rise to wealth and international fame, he reveals the tensions in Garcia Marquez's life between celebrity and literary quality, between politics and writing, and between power, solitude and love. Interviewing more than three hundred people including Fidel Castro, Felipe Gonzalez, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa, the author's large family as well as 'Gabo' himself, Martin immerses himself in Garcia Marquez's world. This at first 'tolerated' and now 'official' biography is as gripping and revealing as the writer's journalism and as complex and involving as any of his fiction.