Juan Rulfo
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Juan Rulfo (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 rests on two slim books, the novel Pedro Páramo (1955), and El llano en llamas (1953, The Burning Plain), a collection of short stories that includes his admired tale "¡Diles que no me maten!" ("Tell Them Not to Kill Me!"). He was named alongside Jorge Luis Borges as the best Spanish-language writer of the 20th century in a poll conducted by Editorial Alfaguara in 1999.
Biography
Rulfo was born Juan Nepomuceno Carlos Pérez-Rulfo Vizcaíno in Sayula, Jalisco, into a family of landowners that was ruined by the Mexican Revolution. His father and two uncles died in the Cristero War of 1926 - 1928, a religiously inspired revolt against the revolutionary government of Mexico; 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. After the publication of his two famous books, he virtually ceased writing narrative fiction, but in other ways he remained a major figure in the Mexican literary world. He began writing screenplays for film and television in 1956; he collaborated with Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez on one of his best-known screenplays, which was made into the classic Mexican film "El gallo de oro" (1964). Rulfo even tried his hand at acting in one film, "En este pueblo no hay ladrones" (1965). He was also an accomplished photographer, though few of his photographs were published in his lifetime.
In the 1960s Rulfo worked on a second novel entitled La cordillera, which dealt with the Cristero Revolt in the state of Jalisco, but he destroyed it without ever having published it or shown it to anyone else. Only a few passages and an outline of the book remain, published posthumously in his transcribed notebooks.
From 1962 until his death, Rulfo served as the director and head editor of the publishing department of INI, the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (National Indigenist Institute), a Mexican government agency. Under Rulfo, INI published a remarkable series of photography books documenting the lives of contemporary Mexican indigenous communities.
Pedro Páramo was published in 1955. The style of this short novel is a precursor of magic realism. Initially, it met with cool critical reception and sold only one thousand copies during the first four years. Later, however, the book became highly acclaimed and has had considerable influence on Latin American literature. 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. García Márquez also 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."
In 1970, Rulfo was awarded Mexico's National Prize for Letters. In 1980, he was elected to the Mexican Academy of Letters. In 1983, he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for literature. He died at age 68 of cancer in Mexico City in 1986. Rulfo's son, filmmaker Juan Carlos Rulfo (born 1964), dedicated his 1999 film Del olvido al no me acuerdo (English title: Juan, I Forgot I Don't Remember) to a search for his father's memory.
- Note: Rulfo's date of birth is under dispute. His [official web site] gives his year of birth as 1917; however, his birth date is often listed as 1918 [link] [link] [link] [link].
Books by Juan Rulfo
- El llano en llamas (1953, The Burning Plain), short stories
- Pedro Páramo (1955), novel
- Antología personal (1978), contains the two earlier books plus two new short stories
- El gallo de oro y otros textos para cine (1980), screenplays
- Juan Rulfo (1980, republished as Inframundo, el México de Juan Rulfo, 1983), photographs by Rulfo, texts by Fernando Benítez, José Emilio Pacheco, and others
- Los cuadernos de Juan Rulfo (1994), transcriptions of his writing notebooks
- Aire de las colinas (2000), a collection of Rulfo's letters
Critical Bibliography
- The Cambridge companion to the Latin American novel / Kristal, Efraín., 2005
- Juan Rulfo's Mexico / Fuentes, Carlos., 2002
- Structures of power: essays on twentieth-century Spanish-American fiction / Peavler, Terry J., 1996
- Juan Rulfo and the south of Jalisco / Vogt, Wolfgang., 1995
- Home as creation: early childhood experience in the literary creation of Márquez, Yáñez, Rulfo / Detjens, Wilma., 1993
- Modern Latin-American fiction writers: First series / Luis, William., 1992
- Inframundo, the México of Juan Rulfo / Pacheco, José Emilio., 1983
- Juan Rulfo (Twayne World Authors Series) / Leal, Luis., 1983
- The emergence of the Latin American novel / Brotherston, Gordon., 1977
- The Mexican novel comes of age / Langford, Walter M., 1971
- Paradise and fall in Rulfo's Pedro Páramo; archetype and structural unity / Freeman, G. Ronald., 1970
- Into the mainstream; conversations with Latin-American writers / Harss, Luis., 1967
References
- ["Asombro por Juan Rulfo"] - Transcription of a speech given by Gabriel García Márquez on the 50th anniversary of El llano en llamas, 18 September 2002.
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