Juan Rulfo - Major Works

Major Works

It was there that Rulfo first began writing under the tutelage of a coworker, Efrén Hernández. In 1944 Rulfo had cofounded the literary journal Pan. Later he was able to advance in his position and he traveled Mexico as an immigration agent. In 1946 he started as a foreman for Goodrich Euzkadi, but his mild temperament led him to prefer working as a wholesale traveling sales agent. This obligated him to travel throughout all of southern Mexico, until he was fired in 1952 for asking for a radio for his company car.

He married Clara Angelina Aparicio Reyes (Mexico City, August 12, 1928) in Guadalajara, Jalisco, on April 24, 1948; they had four children, Claudia Berenice (Mexico City, January 29, 1949), Juan Francisco (Guadalajara, Jalisco, December 13, 1950), Juan Pablo (México City, April 18, 1955) and Juan Carlos Rulfo (México City, January 24, 1964). Juan Rulfo obtained a fellowship at the Centro Mexicano de Escritores, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. There, between 1952 and 1954, he was able to write the two books that would make him famous.

The first book was a collection of harshly realistic short stories titled El Llano en llamas (1953). The stories centered around life in rural Mexico around the time of the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero Rebellion. Among the best-known stories are "¡Diles que no me maten!" ("Tell Them Not To Kill Me!"), about an old man, set to be executed, captured by orders of a colonel who happens to be the son of a man he killed about forty years ago; and "No oyes ladrar los perros" ("You Don't Hear the Dogs Barking"), about a man carrying his estranged, adult, wounded son on his back to find a doctor.

The second book was Pedro Páramo (1955) a short novel about a man named Juan Preciado who travels to his recently deceased mother's hometown, Comala, to find about his father, only to come across a literal ghost town─populated, that is, by spectral figures. Initially, the novel met with cool critical reception and sold only two thousand copies during the first four years; later, however, the book became highly acclaimed. Páramo was a key influence of Latin American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez. Pedro Páramo has been translated into more than 30 different languages and the English version has been sold more than a million times in the United States.

The book went through several changes in name. In two letters written in 1947 to his fiancée Clara Aparicio he refers to the title of this work he was writing then as Una estrella junto a la luna (A Star Next to the Moon), saying that it was causing him some work. During the last stages of writing, he wrote in journals that the title would be Los murmullos (The Murmurs), a title that demonstrates the inspiration of the novel The Wild Palms, also known as If I Forget Thee Jerusalem by William Faulkner, and thanks to a grant from the Centro Mexicano de Escritores Rulfo was able to finish the writing between 1953 and 1954 and publish it in 1955.

Gabriel García Márquez has said that he felt blocked as a novelist after writing his first four books and that it was only his life-changing discovery of Pedro Páramo in 1961 that opened his way to the composition of his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude. He noted that all of Rulfo's published writing, put together, "add up to no more than 300 pages; but that is almost as many and I believe they are as durable, as the pages that have come down to us from Sophocles".