Mexican novelist and critic Carlos Fuentes was amazed by the first three chapters of One Hundred Years of Solitude that Garcia Marquez sent him for review. Once published, the novel was snatched up by the public, selling out its first printing within a week. Critics were on their feet, fellow novelists took their caps off, and everyone wanted to talk to Garcia Marquez about the story. Printers could not keep up with the demand for what Chilean poet Pablo Neruda called, in a March 1970 issue of Time, "the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since the Don Quixote of Cervantes." American novelist William Kennedy similarly wrote in the National Observer that the book "is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race."

Early reviews of the novel were almost uniformly positive, with praise for...