Happy Birthday Gabriel García Márquez: 85 Years of Anything but Solitude for the Beloved Writer

The world is saying happy birthday today to Gabriel García Márquez, a Nobel Laureate and one of the most beloved living authors, who is perhaps best known for his 1967 masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Best known for his stunning novels One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, García Márquez, affectionately known as Gabo, is the pride of Colombia, and he is still going strong even in his advanced age.

The grandfather of South America's magical realism literary movement, García Márquez is known throughout the world as one of the preeminent living writers, and he continues to publish every couple of years, as he has for most of his adult life.

Though he was born in Colombia, he has lived in Mexico for the past several decades.

Gabriel García Márquez exploded onto the international literary scene in spectacular fashion in 1967 when he released his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, which has since been translated into 37 languages and sold more than 30 million copies around the globe.

This year also coincides with the 30-year anniversary of García Márquez winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

And his birthday will also be celebrated this year with an accomplishment Gabriel García Márquez could never have imagined when he was born in Aracataca, Colombia on March 6, 1927: the release of an electronic version of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

I do not know if it will be as successful as hoped but it is the goal, Carmen Balcells, Garcia Marquez's literary agent, said Monday on Colombian radio Caracol, according to Agence France Presse.

Gabriel García Márquez has fought a battle with cancer off and on since 1999, and his agent told AFP that he has been weakened by the disease and is a little woozy.

The celebration of his 85th birthday was celebrated extensively by Twitter users, who took to the social media site from computers all over the globe to sing his praises, eventually leading Gabriel García Márquez to be a worldwide trending Twitter topic:

Twitter user @YourAnonNews, tweeted the following message on Tuesday: Happy Birthday to Gabriel García Márquez, one of the most influential Latin American authors. He turns 85 today.

And @LatinaMagazine put it simply with this short tweet: Happy Birthday to Gabriel García Márquez! One of the great writers of our time!

It's a sentiment the whole world shares today.