Gabriel García Márquez dies at 87

Nobel Prize winning novelist Gabriel García Márquez died of cancer Thursday in Mexico City. He was 87. News of the Colombian author's death comes a day after his family said in a statement that his health was "very fragile" following a nine-day hospitalization over a lung and urinary tract infections. Last week it was revealed that García Márquez's lymphatic cancer returned. He was diagnosed with the disease in 1999 and by now it had spread to his lungs, liver and lymph nodes. He was not eligible for treatment given his age and the advanced condition of the cancer. García Márquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia on March 6, 1927. He began his writing career as a journalist and went by the name Gabo. He won a Nobel Prize in 1982 for his short stories "in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts." The Colombian author is best known for his novels One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera and Autumn of the Patriarch. García Márquez is survived by his wife Mercedes Barcha, and two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo.