Texas university acquires Gabriel García Márquez’s personal archive

See also: The great and magical Gabo

WASHINGTON – Archives belonging to Nobel prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez, who died earlier this year, have been acquired by the University of Texas at Austin, the university said in a statement Monday.

A half-century of the acclaimed novelist’s original manuscripts and personal papers, written mostly in Spanish, are among the documents in the archives, which are to be housed in the university’s Harry Ransom Center.

The Ransom Center at the University of Austin, Texas’ capital city, houses a humanities research center, a museum and a library.

Born in Colombia, García Márquez died in Mexico City this past April at the age of 87.

Among the trove of his writings acquired by the university are original manuscripts for his masterpieces “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” and “Love in the Time of Cholera.”

“García Márquez is a giant of 20th-century literature whose work brims with originality and wisdom,” said Bill Powers, president of The University of Texas at Austin, in a statement.

“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,” he said.

Powers did not say how much the center paid to obtain the collection which includes more than 2,000 García Márquez letters, including correspondence from legendary writers Carlos Fuentes and Graham Greene, drafts of his 1982 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and more than 40 photograph albums documenting all aspects of his life.