His best known work is "One Hundred Years of Solitude", which sold 20 million copies.

Or, as the OP describes it:

> The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda called it “the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since ‘Don Quixote.’ ” The novelist William Kennedy hailed it as “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.”

It's an excellent book, and he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. That said, I'm kind of surprised (but pleased) to see that his passing was noted by HN readers.