The Harry Ransom Center announced that it has digitized more than 27,000 images and page scans from Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez’s archive. And all of it is available freely online.
Included are drafts and other materials relating to all García Márquez’s major works of fiction — along with his most well-known novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” — along with 22 personal scrapbooks and notebooks, a memoir, screenplays, photographs and ephemera.
The online archive is cataloged both in English and in Spanish with text-searchable English- and Spanish-language materials. Researchers can also use an online viewing tool to make side-by-side comparisons of different drafts of various works as they evolved.
The Ransom Center bought García Márquez’s archive for $2.2 million in 2015. Since then it remains one of the center’s most popularly used collections by both scholars and fans alike.
That García Márquez’s massive archive was so quickly digitized is an impressive undertaking. Ditto the archive’s remarkable accessibility.
“My mother, my brother and I were always committed to having my father’s archive reach the broadest possible audience,” said Rodrigo García, one of the author’s sons. “This project makes my father’s work more widely accessible to a global community of students and scholars.”
Like many authors and artists, García Márquez always professed no interest in reviews of his work. But in fact, his archive bears out quite the opposite. Included in the materials now digitized are the scrapbooks the author kept, copiously collected clippings of reviews and press coverage.
