Carmen Balcells, Gabriel García Márquez’s literary agent who sold his classic title One Hundred Years of Solitude, passed away this past September.
Before she died, she did one final interview with Vanity Fair in which she spoke frankly about her career. In the interview she explains discovering the work and selling it to Harper & Row. Here is an excerpt:
I was reading García Márquez—one of the early books—and I said to Luis, ‘This is so fantastic, Luis, that we have to read it at the same time.’ So I made a copy of it. We both had enthusiasm for it: it was so fresh, so original, so exciting. Every reader says in his mind, of certain books, ‘This is one of the best books I have ever read.’ When that happens to a book again and again, all over the world, you have a masterpiece. That is what happened with Gabriel García Márquez