Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” includes one of the most famous examples of pandemics in literature, says Álvaro Santana-Acuña, curator of a Márquez exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
The story centers around a child who comes to the fictional town of Macondo in the Caribbean, and spreads an illness that infects the entire population. The town enforces a quarantine that “transforms the state of emergency into, like, a natural thing,” Santana-Acuña says.
“One Hundred Years of Solitude” was published in 1967; Santana-Acuña says it became “an instant bestseller” and a “global classic.”