Profile of Juan Rulfo on Famous Like Me

Juan Rulfo (born 16 May 1917 – 7 January 1986) was a Mexican novelist, short story writer, and photographer, one of Latin America's most esteemed authors. Rulfo's reputation is based on two books, El llano en llamas (1953, The Burning Plain), a collection of short stories which included his admired tale "Tell Them Not to Kill Me!", and the novel Pedro Páramo (1955). He was named alongisde Jorge Luis Borges as the best writer in spanish of the 20th century by a poll conducted by Editorial Alfaguara in 1999.

Rulfo was born Juan Nepomuceno Carlos Pérez Rulfo Vizcaíno in Sayula, Jalisco, into a family of landowners who were ruined by the Mexican Revolution. His father and two uncles were murdered, and his mother died from a heart attack. Rulfo was sent to an orphanage in Guadalajara, Jalisco, where he lived from 1928 to 1932. He attended seminary for a while, then moved to Mexico City to study law at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He was forced to give up his studies, though, and for some twenty years he worked as an immigration agent throughout Mexico.

In 1944 Rulfo co-founded the literary journal Pan. He wrote television screenplays for a while, and worked for the National Institute for Indigenous Studies. In 1980, he was elected to the Mexican Academy of Letters.

Pedro Páramo was published in 1955. Initially, it met with cool critical reception and sold only one thousand copies the first four years. Later however, the book became acclaimed and has had considerable influence on Latin American literature. Gabriel García Márquez even included a sentence from it in his One Hundred Years of Solitude. His style is a precursor of magic realism. Rulfo later wrote a novel entitled La cordillera, but he destroyed it without ever having published it.

In 1983, Rulfo was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for literature. He died at age 68 of cancer in Mexico City in 1986.

Note: Rulfo's date of birth is under dispute. His offical web site gives his year of birth as 1917; however, his birth date is often listed as 1918.

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