Juan Rulfo Biography

Juan Rulfo was born in Barranca de Apulco, in Jalisco, Mexico, on May 16, 1918, but his family soon moved to San Gabriel, in the same state of Jalisco, where the young Rulfo suffered the assassination of his father in 1925 and the death of his mother by heart attack two years later. In 1928 Rulfo enrolled in an orphanage in Guadalajara run by Josephine nuns, where he remained until 1932, when he entered the seminary to become a priest. He left the seminary upon the death of his grandmother, preferring to study business and law. A strike at the University of Guadalajara forestalled his higher education, and in 1935 he moved to Mexico City, where he immediately began working in the Office of the Ministry of Migration. He left the Ministry in 1946 to become a traveling salesman for Goodrich Tires. He married Clara Aparicio in 1948 and had four children. He worked in public relations for Goodrich, then in publishing and television before joining the Instituto Indigenista in 1962.

Rulfo published his first stories in periodicals as early as 1945. In 1952 a fellowship at the Center for Mexican Writers made it possible for him to complete and collect his stories for his first book, The Burning Plain, and Other Stories. A second year of fellowship allowed him to complete his novel Pedro Páramo. Though he continued to write, Rulfo did not continue to publish, publishing only a novelette, screenplays, and occasional essays of literary criticism until his death on January 7, 1986, from lung cancer.

Juan Rulfo’s father, a rural landowner, was murdered when Rulfo was six years old. The boy was sent to boarding school in Guadalajara. Two years later, his mother died. Rulfo did not receive the news until after she was buried. The orphaned Rulfo went to live with an uncle in Mexico City. Ashamed of Rulfo’s provincial manners, the uncle asked him to change his name. Juan Pérez thus became Juan Rulfo. He spent the rest of his life searching for the pieces of himself that he had lost before he turned sixteen: his father, his mother, his name.

In Mexico City, Rulfo took a government job. Shy and lonely, he would remain in the office after hours writing fiction. His first novel (never published) was titled Hijo del desaliento (child of despair). It was the biography of a young man in search of his place in the world. A coworker read one of Rulfo’s stories and had it published. Later, a friend published other stories by Rulfo in a Guadalajara magazine. Rulfo’s fame spread.

Many of Rulfo’s stories treat the theme of identity as a quest for family roots. One of his first tales, “Macario,” tells of an orphan living with his godmother, yearning to be reunited with his dead parents. Another relates the journey of a group of landless peasants searching for a place to settle permanently. A third story concerns a girl who loses a cow—her dowry—in a flood, and with it her only chance for a husband and a family. Still another orphaned Rulfo character declares: “It’s hard to grow up knowing you’re the branch of a dead tree.”

By the mid-1960’s, Rulfo was admired and influential. Gabriel García Márquez confesses that reading Rulfo’s works gave him the key for completing his own masterpiece, Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970). Carlos Fuentes calls Rulfo Mexico’s greatest novelist.

Rulfo was a loner to the end. He would go to extremes to avoid meeting people. Sometimes Rulfo even changed his appearance in order to escape notice. He once arrived for an interview in disguise. Deciding not to grant the interview, Rulfo fled without revealing who he was. Rulfo died in 1986 of lung cancer.