Biography Essay

Although Juan Rulfo's literary production was meager, it has had an impact on Latin-American narrative fiction that surpasses that of many prolific novelists or short-story writers. His popularity, not only in Latin America but also in Europe, may be explained by the fact that his collection of short stories El llano en llamas (1953; translated as The Burning Plain and Other Stories, 1967) and his novel Pedro Paramo (1955; translated, 1959) capture in a powerful way the essence of rural Mexico and its people. There may be another reason for this popularity, and that is the introduction by Rulfo of a new type of fiction into Latin-American letters, a fiction that was soon to explode into the so-called Boom, with the novels of Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar, and Mario Vargas Llosa, among others.

Rulfo's two major works of fiction, his film scripts—collected in El gallo...