| Juan Rulfo |
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| CATEGORIES ABOUT JUAN RULFO | |
| 1917 births | |
| rulfo, juan | |
| 1986 deaths | |
| mexican writers | |
| mexican novelists | |
| magic realism writers | |
| people from jalisco | |
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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 Screenplay s 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.
BOOKS BY JUAN RULFO
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