One Hundred Years of Solitude. by Garcia Marquez, Gabriel - 1970

New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1970. First American edition of the author's magnum opus. Octavo, original green cloth with gilt lettering to the spine. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the dedication page, "Para Rita, de su amigo, Gabriel Garcia Marquez 1976." Fine in a fine first issue dust jacket with the exclamation point at the end of the first paragraph on the front flap. Jacket design by Guy Fleming. Translated by Gregory Rabassa. Housed in a custom clamshell box. An exceptional example. "One Hundred Years of Solitude chronicles the life of Macondo, a fictional town based in part of Garcia Marquez's hometown of Aracataca, Columbia, and seven generations of the founding family, the Buendias. He creates a complex world with characters and events that display the full range of human experience. For the reader, the pleasure of the novel derives from its fast-paced narrative, humor, vivid characters, and fantasy elements. In this 'magic realism', the author combines imaginative flights of fancy with social realism to give us images of levitating priests, flying carpets, a four-year-long rainstorm, and a young woman ascending to heaven while folding sheets" (NYPL Books of the Century 31).