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Speaking of Stories from the page to the stage |
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JUAN RULFO Mexican novelist and short story writer, one of Spanish America's most esteemed authors. Rulfo's reputation is based on two slim 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), one of the models for Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude. After publishing the work, Rulfo fell silent as a novelist.Juan Rulfo was born Juan Nepomuceno Carlos Pérez Vizcaíno Rulfo in Sayula, in the province of Jalisco, into a family of landowners. (According to one source, his birth year was 1917, not 1918.) His ancestors came to South America from the north of Spain around 1790. During his childhood the region was a scene of political unrest, erosion and war, and it later provided the background and atmosphere of Rulfo's fiction. Rulfo experienced the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and cristero rebellion. It caused widespread destruction during the late 1920s. Rulfo's family suffered financial ruin, his father and two uncles were murdered in the troubles and his mother died in 1927 of a heart attack. No one adopted Rulfo and he was sent to an orphanage. After attending the Luis Silva school for orphans in Guadaljara from 1928 to 1932 and then seminary and secondary school, Rulfo moved to Mexico City, where he studied for a short time law at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Rulfo was forced to give up his studies, and for the next two decades he worked as an immigration agent in Mexico City, Tampico, Guadalajara, and Veracruz. In 1947 he married Clara Aparicio, they had one daughter and three sons. Rulfo began writing around 1940, but destroyed his first novel. At the age of 35 Rulfo wrote his first collection of short stories, El llano en llamas, which consists of fifteen tales. In 1953 he started to write the novel Pedro Páramo, which mixed reality and fantasy. These works sum up the so-called "novel of the Mexican revolution." Rulfo did not talk much of his fiction. He was known to write a novel entitled La cordillera, but he did not show the manuscript to anybody. However, he wrote several film scripts, of which Gallo de oro from 1964 is most famous. Rulfo co-founded in 1944 with Juan José Arreola and Antonio Alatorre of the literary review Pan. He worked for Goodrich-Euzkadi rubber company (1947-1954), and in 1955-56 he was a staff member of the publishing section of the Papaloapan Commission for land development. He wrote screenplays in Mexico City in the late 1950s and worked then in television in Guadalajara. From the early 1960s Rulfo was a staff member and later the director of the editorial department of National Institute for Indigenous Studies. In 1980 he was elected member of the Mexican Academy of Letters. Rulfo died in Mexico City on January 7, 1986. Rulfo received several awards, among others the National Literature Prize in 1970 and Príncipe de Asturias Prize in 1983. |
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