Ransom Center Expands
Harry Ransom Center snags archive from Nobel Prize-winning writer Gabriel García Márquez
The Harry Ransom Center has snagged another major collection from one of the most celebrated writers of the 20th century. Gabriel García Márquez, the Nobel Prize-winning Colombian novelist, journalist and writer, penned such modern classics as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera.
Nicknamed "Gabo" by his fans, García Márquez was a beloved figure in Latin America. Beginning his career as a journalist in Bogotá and Cartagena in the 1940s, García Márquez eventually landed in Mexico City where he began his storied career as a novelist.
Among the pieces the Ransom Center will add from García Márquez are the original manuscripts for 10 books including One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera andMemories of My Melancholy Whores. The collection will also include more than 2,000 letters from literary stalwarts like Graham Greene, drafts of his 1982 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, scrapbooks, photographs and the Smith Corona typewriter he used to craft his novels.
"García Márquez is a giant of twentieth-century literature whose work brims with originality and wisdom," said Bill Powers, president of The University of Texas at Austin. "The University of Texas at Austin — with expertise in both Latin America and the preservation and study of the writing process — is the natural home for this very important collection. Our students, our faculty, and the state of Texas will benefit from it for years to come."
In addition to García Márquez, the Ransom Center is also home to the collections of writers including Samuel Beckett, J. M. Coetzee, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Doris Lessing, George Bernard Shaw, Isaac Bashevis Singer, John Steinbeck and W. B. Yeats.
This mix-and-match coasters depict Austin landmarks that only locals know, including some that have closed.Photo courtesy of Blue Genie Art Bazaar