Ascent to glory how One hundred years of solitude was written and became a global classic

This is not a literary exploration of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. What Santana Acuña (Whitman College) undertakes is an exhaustive, in-depth search to discover why García Márquez's famous novel has had such international success since its publication in 1967--how and why it came, and continues, to be considered a "global classic." Santana Acuña argues that regardless of the book's literary quality there are biographical, historical, cultural, editorial, sociological, financial, political, educational, and ideological circumstances at play, and they worked together to make the novel so famous. Without all these the book would not have the global relevance it has achieved. Santana Acuña uses a counterfactual theory to make his argument, and in the end he concludes that if One Hundred Years of Solitude had been published 20 years earlier, at best it would have been considered a good Colombian novel, and at worst it would have gone completely unnoticed. Including chronologies, statistical charts, documents, and photos, in addition to standard scholarly apparatus, this is a book for those interested in the sociology of literature, Latin American literature in particular. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Jesús S. Bottaro, Medgar Evers College of The City University of New York