Gabriel García Márquez and Juan Bosch

Gabriel García Márquez, celebrated Colombian novelist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, died on Thursday, April 17, 2014 at age 87, in his home in Mexico City.

His passing has graced the front pages of news outlets around the world — especially in the Dominican Republic. Not only for his place in literary history, but also for his connection to the Republic and one of its most admired historical figures, former president Juan Bosh.

In 1979, García Márquez would make his first and only official trip to the Dominican Republic, to pay homage to Bosch, his friend and former teacher.

According to Victor Manuel Grimaldi Céspedes, author of the book "Juan Bosch y García Márquez, Entrevistas", García Márquez received lessons "on the art of writing stories" from Juan Bosh in Caracas, Venezuela, back in 1959.

The now iconic photograph of Márquez and Bosch, which also graces the cover of Grimaldi's book, was taken during Márquez's 1979 visit, at Juan Bosch's home at the time.

After his death, The New York Times called García Márquez a "Conjurer of Literary Magic" — while the American Book Review, proclaimed the first lines of his celebrated novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, as having one of the "Best First Lines from Novels" of all-time.

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Col. Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of 20 adobe houses built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”