Gabriel García Márquez
University of Texas has opened sixty years’ worth of Gabriel García Márquez's manuscripts, photographs and letters for researchers. REUTERS

Last month, it was revealed that Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez was in fact spied on by the FBI for 24 years, since 1961 until 1985. At the time, director of the agency, Edgar J. Hoover, requested the Colombian writer to be flagged so that the agency would be notified immediately if he entered the United States. Now, researchers might be able to find more on the matter since the University of Texas library has just opened its collection of the Nobel Prize-winning author’s personal material.

The collection reportedly includes sixty years worth of personal letters, photographs, manuscripts and other materials from García Márquez’s life. All of it was obtained by the university’s Harry Ransom Center, which is one of the world’s largest collectors of humanities original source material. Bibliographer Jose Montelongo, who’s worked with the material, says the archive will let people see a more human side of the master artist. “This is the side in which he rejects paragraphs and entire pages and has to rewrite, or abandon a path for a new one,” Montelongo continued.

The outstanding collection includes up to 40 boxes of literary drafts, including from works such as “Love in the Time of Cholera,” “Of Love and Other Demons” and “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Plus another 10 or so boxes of personal correspondence from 1961-2013, as well as photographic albums with pictures of the author with friends like Woody Allen, Luis Buñuel and Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

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