He destroyed his daily working notes and family trees for “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” according to Gerald Martin’s 2009 biography.

“My father was a perfectionist, and a perfectionist doesn’t show work in progress,” Rodrigo García, one of the author’s two sons, said in an interview. “He would always tell anecdotes about characters in the book he was writing, but would only show it when it was about 90 percent there.”

The author did not object that his wife, Mercedes, saved manuscripts of later books, Mr. García said, but was “adamant” about more private material. On their engagement, family legend has it, he offered to buy back the love letters he wrote to Mercedes so he could destroy them.

“I don’t think he wanted to leave a personal paper trail,” Mr. García said, calling his father a “phone person” who wrote few family letters. “What he would say was, ‘Everything I’ve lived, everything I’ve thought, is in my books.’ ”

García Márquez, who kept few copies of outgoing letters, did correspond with other writers. The estimated 2,000 pieces of correspondence in the archive include letters from Graham Greene, Milan Kundera, Julio Cortázar, Günter Grass and Carlos Fuentes, who in 1979 discussed preparing a letter with Mr. Cortázar “to publicly address the issue of U.S. blacklists.” (The travel ban against García Márquez, ostensibly stemming from his involvement with the Colombian Communist Party in the 1950s, was lifted by President Bill Clinton in 1995.)

The archive contains little material relating to his friendship with Fidel Castro or to his political activities, not because anything was held back by the family, his son said, but because García Márquez preferred to conduct such business in person or on the phone.

“My father believed in behind-the-scenes political work,” Mr. García said. “Like with his books, he was interested in the results, not necessarily in people knowing what had been done to achieve what.”