In 1965, Gabriel García Márquez was driving to Acapulco for a vacation with his family when he thought of the beginning for a new book; he then turned his car around, asked his wife to manage the family's finances for the coming months, and drove back home to Colombia. For the next eighteen months, García Márquez spent his time writing what would eventually become One Hundred Years of Solitude. Though inspired by Colombian history and his experiences as a journalist, García Márquez was greatly influenced by his maternal grandparents: Nicolás Ricardo Márquez and Doña Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes. A decorated veteran of the Thousand Days' War, Ricardo Márquez's accounts of the rebellion against the conservative Colombian government led his grandson to a socialist outlook. Meanwhile, Doña Iguarán Cotes' superstitious beliefs became the foundation of One Hundred Years of Solitude's style. The couple's house in Aracataca where García Márquez spent his childhood inspired him to make his book's setting of Macondo.[11]
García Márquez was one of the four Latin American novelists first included in the literary Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s; the other three were the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, the Argentine Julio Cortázar, and the Mexican Carlos Fuentes. One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) earned García Márquez international fame as a novelist of the magical realism movement within Latin American literature.[12]
