At the University Rulfo began writing under the tutelage of a coworker, . In 1944, Rulfo co-founded the
literary journal Pan. Later, he was able to advance in his career and travel throughout Mexico as an immigration agent. In 1946, he started as a foreman for
Goodrich-Euzkadi, but his mild temperament led him to prefer working as a wholesale traveling sales agent. This obligated him to travel throughout all of southern Mexico, until he was fired in 1952 for asking for a radio for his company car. Rulfo obtained a fellowship at the Centro Mexicano de Escritores, supported by the
Rockefeller Foundation. There, between 1952 and 1954, he was able to write two books. The first book was a collection of harshly realistic short stories,
El Llano en llamas (1953). The stories centered on life in rural Mexico around the time of the
Mexican Revolution and the Cristero War. Among the best-known stories are "¡Diles que no me maten!" ("Tell Them Not To Kill Me!"), a story about an old man, set to be executed, who is captured by order of a colonel, who happens to be the son of a man whom the condemned man had killed about forty years earlier. The story contains echoes of the biblical Cain and Abel theme as well as themes related to the Mexican Revolution, such as land rights and land use. In the story "No oyes ladrar los perros" ("Do You Hear the Dogs Barking?") a man carries his wounded adult son on his back to find a doctor. His monologue reveals the burdens of a father facing the complicated truth of a son who became a bandit and killed his own godfather. The story "El hombre" ("The Man") evinces a complex narrative structure consisting of alternating voices and eventually revealing a complex cycle of violence. Rulfo's spare descriptive style, dialogues often revealing colloquial language and harsh landscapes metaphoric of the many characters' existential crises elevates Mexican regional fiction to a more universal stage. Rulfo's second book was
Pedro Páramo (1955), a short novel about a man named Juan Preciado who travels to his recently deceased mother's hometown, Comala, to find his father, only to find a deserted village populated by spectral figures. Through uncanny encounters with these figures, his own death and dialogues among the ghosts a portrait of a cruel despotic strongman Pedro Páramo is revealed. Again, Rulfo turns what could on the surface be considered regional literature into a story replete with universal myths, such as the search for the father, love triangles, revenge, solitude, etc. Initially, the novel met with cool critical reception and sold only two thousand copies during the first four years; later, however, the book became highly acclaimed.
Páramo was a key influence for Latin American writers such as
Gabriel García Márquez.
Pedro Páramo has been translated into more than 30 languages, and the English version has sold more than a million copies in the United States. The book went through several changes in name. In two letters written in 1947 to his fiancée Clara Aparicio, he refers to the novel he was writing as
Una estrella junto a la luna (
A Star Next to the Moon), saying that it was causing him some trouble. During the last stages of writing, he wrote in journals that the title would be
Los murmullos (
The Murmurs). With the assistance of a grant from the Centro Mexicano de Escritores, Rulfo was able to finish the book between 1953 and 1954; it was published in 1955. In passages of the novel
Pedro Páramo, the influence of American
novelist William Faulkner is notable, according to Rulfo's former friend,
philologist Antonio Alatorre. Between 1956 and 1958, Rulfo worked on a novella entitled
El gallo de oro (
The Golden Cockerel), which was not published until 1980. A revised and corrected edition was issued posthumously in 2010. The Fundación Rulfo possesses fragments of two unfinished novels,
La cordillera and
Ozumacín. Rulfo told interviewer Luis Harss that he had written and destroyed an earlier novel set in Mexico City. From 1954 to 1957, Rulfo collaborated with the Río Papaloapan Commission, a government institution working on socioeconomic development of the settlements along the
Papaloapan River. From 1962 until his death in 1986, he worked as an editor for the
National Institute for Indigenous People. ==Personal life==