Google Doodle: 8 Facts About Gabriel García Márquez

Google often uses the doodles on its homepage to honor significant cultural figures or to celebrate holidays. On Tuesday, the company featured Gabriel García Márquez and his Nobel prize winning novel One Hundred Years of Solitude on what would have been Márquez's 91st birthday.

The illustration featured elements from his novel like the vivid colors of the jungle, a running river, a train and a family home. The author more affectionately known to many in Latin America as Gabo, died of pneumonia in 2014, when he was 87.

Before his death, Márquez wrote a number of novels as well as some non-fiction books.

8 facts about Gabriel García Márquez:

1. Márquez actually studied law in school before he became a journalist and then a famed novelist.
2. Fidel Castro, the communist former prime minister and president of Cuba, and Márquez were quite close: there's even a book about their friendship. Márquez also worked for Castro's news service and Castro gave him a mansion in Havana, according to Encyclopedia Britannica.
3. During his life, Márquez wrote more than 25 books, some of the most famous were Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude.
4. Márquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia, in 1927, he spent the first eight years of his life there with his grandparents until his grandfather died.
5. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987 for "his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts," according to the official Nobel Prize website.
6. Márquez was the oldest of 12 children between his mother and father, he also had other half siblings on his father's side.
7. He and his wife, Mercedes Barcha Pardo, were in debt when he finished and published One Hundred Years of Solitude.
8. His wife died less than eight months after he did. The couple had two sons.