Souvenirs of a Literary Alchemist

Gabriel García Márquez, who died in April at 87, was a strong critic of American imperialism who was banned from entry to the United States for decades, even after “One Hundred Years of Solitude” vaulted him to international celebrity and, in 1982, the Nobel Prize in Literature.

But now García Márquez, who was born in Colombia and lived much of his adult life in Mexico City, has “gone to Texas,” as they say.

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin will announce on Monday that it has acquired García Márquez’s archive, which contains manuscripts, notebooks, photo albums, correspondence and personal artifacts, including two Smith Corona typewriters and five Apple computers.

At the Ransom Center, one of the nation’s leading literary archives — and the only one “in the country’s borderlands with Latin America,” noted Steve Enniss, its director — García Márquez’s literary remains will be preserved alongside those of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges and other global figures.

“It’s almost as if James Joyce meets Gabriel García Márquez, whose influence on the 20th-century novel in some way mirrored his own,” Mr. Enniss said of the acquisition. “It’s very fitting that García Márquez is joining our collections. It’s hard to think of a novelist who has had as wide-ranging an impact.”

The archive, purchased from his family, includes material relating to all of García Márquez’s important books, from the landmark “One Hundred Years of Solitude” — represented by the finished typescript sent to his publisher, bearing a hand-lettered title page and only a few corrections — to “We’ll See Each Other in August,” his final, unfinished novel, which exists in as many as 10 versions. Both the Ransom Center and the family declined to provide the price of the deal.

“Solitude,” published in Spanish in 1967 and in English in 1970, may have transformed world literature and turned García Márquez into a global celebrity, but it is the messier drafts of subsequent books that may be of most interest to scholars.

“It’s like an open window into the lab of a renowned alchemist who didn’t always love the idea of having the recipes of his potions be known,” said Jose Montelongo, a Latin American literature specialist at the University of Texas who visited the García Márquez home in Mexico City with Mr. Enniss in July to evaluate the material. “They show you the weaknesses, the discarded versions, the eliminated words. You really see the struggle of creation.”

García Márquez certainly expressed wariness at the prospect of scholars picking over his traces. “It’s like being caught in your underwear,” he told Playboy in 1983.

He destroyed his daily working notes and family trees for “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” according to Gerald Martin’s 2009 biography.

“My father was a perfectionist, and a perfectionist doesn’t show work in progress,” Rodrigo García, one of the author’s two sons, said in an interview. “He would always tell anecdotes about characters in the book he was writing, but would only show it when it was about 90 percent there.”

The author did not object that his wife, Mercedes, saved manuscripts of later books, Mr. García said, but was “adamant” about more private material. On their engagement, family legend has it, he offered to buy back the love letters he wrote to Mercedes so he could destroy them.

“I don’t think he wanted to leave a personal paper trail,” Mr. García said, calling his father a “phone person” who wrote few family letters. “What he would say was, ‘Everything I’ve lived, everything I’ve thought, is in my books.’ ”

García Márquez, who kept few copies of outgoing letters, did correspond with other writers. The estimated 2,000 pieces of correspondence in the archive include letters from Graham Greene, Milan Kundera, Julio Cortázar, Günter Grass and Carlos Fuentes, who in 1979 discussed preparing a letter with Mr. Cortázar “to publicly address the issue of U.S. blacklists.” (The travel ban against García Márquez, ostensibly stemming from his involvement with the Colombian Communist Party in the 1950s, was lifted by President Bill Clinton in 1995.)

The archive contains little material relating to his friendship with Fidel Castro or to his political activities, not because anything was held back by the family, his son said, but because García Márquez preferred to conduct such business in person or on the phone.

“My father believed in behind-the-scenes political work,” Mr. García said. “Like with his books, he was interested in the results, not necessarily in people knowing what had been done to achieve what.”

The archive, which was prepared for sale by the dealer Glenn Horowitz but has yet to be fully cataloged, does show García Márquez’s political side “in oblique ways,” Mr. Montelongo said.

He cited correspondence with the Spanish-language edition of Life, in which García Márquez declined to be interviewed for that magazine because he felt it would create a false sense of Life’s openness to left-wing ideas.

The archive also contains notes on a 1998 visit to the White House, when García Márquez asked Mr. Clinton if he had any advisers who weren’t “fanatically anti-Castro,” Mr. Montelongo said.

The more than 40 photo albums in the collection contain some images of Mr. Castro, as well as a visual chronicle of the private Gabo, as García Márquez was affectionately known throughout Latin America, beginning with his early life in rural Colombia, Mr. Montelongo said.

There is also the matter of the unfinished novel. Mr. García, a director and screenwriter living in California, said he, his mother and his brother had not decided whether to publish that book, about a middle-aged married woman having an affair on a tropical island. It has been excerpted in The New Yorker and the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia.

But that story was certainly not the last tale his father wanted to tell, Mr. García said.

He recalled a comment his father made not long before his death: “One of the saddest things about dying is that it’s the only event in my life I won’t be able to write about.”