Gabriel García Márquez was a Nobel Prize–winning novelist who began his writing career as a journalist. He is most well known for his novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, which centers on the Buendía family's involvement in Colombian history over the course of one century in the fictional village of Macondo.

Other notable novels include The Autumn of the Patriarch, written without conventional chapters or paragraphs, which reviews the lifetime abuses and achievements of a dictator exiled on an island.

A moving love story situated within the social and political upheavals of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America is Love in the Time of Cholera. Much as Albert Camus did with The Plague, García Márquez uses the metaphor of a disease, cholera, to explore the illness and decay of modern society.