Colombian author and Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who crafted enchanting stories that blurred the line between magic and reality, died on Thursday at the age of 87. * Garcia Marquez was born in 1927 in Aracataca, a town near Colombia’s Caribbean coast. * He spent almost two years writing “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” the novel that made him famous. It helped him win the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature.