García Márquez, conjuror of literary magic

GABRIEL García Márquez, the Colombian novelist whose One Hundred Years of Solitude established him as a giant of 20th-century literature, died on Thursday at his home in Mexico City. He was 87.

García Márquez learned he had lymphatic cancer in 1999, and a brother said in 2012 that he had developed senile dementia.

García Márquez, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, wrote fiction rooted in a mythical Latin American landscape of his own creation, but his appeal was universal. His books were translated into dozens of languages. He was among a select roster of canonical writers - Dickens, Tolstoy and Hemingway among them - who were embraced both by critics and by a mass audience.