Juan Rulfo was born in 1917, in rural Jalisco, western central Mexico, to a family of landowners, lawyers, bureaucrats and politicians. He came into the world towards the end of the Mexican Revolution and in a turbulent period during which his family lost most of their land, and he lost most of his family. At a young age he was exposed to the bloody horrors of the Cristero Wars, a Catholic backlash against the Jacobinism of the early Revolutionary state. In the 1950s, when the modernizing and aggressively capitalistic government of Miguel Alemán was building the new industrialized urban Mexico at the expense of a neglected and impoverished countryside, Rulfo published a book of short stories and a novel of a hundred or so pages: El Llano en llamas in 1953 and Pedro Páramo in 1955. Both are deeply embedded in the brutal and often sordid world of the peasant farmer of Jalisco and share a dark poetic intensity and a laconic, seductive and disturbing intractability. The novel is marked by a greater lyricism and metaphysical resonance than the stories. Rulfo was an extraordinary photographer and an enthusiastic participant in many aspects of cinematography. From the publication of Pedro Páramo until his death in 1986, as a state bureaucrat, an employee of the Goodrich tyre company and an editor in the Mexican Indigenist Agency, he published virtually nothing apart from El gallo de oro, prompting obsessive speculation and even the dramatic reflection by Evodio Escalante that ‘Rulfo, en tanto escritor, murió hace treinta años […] Desde entonces se convirtió en un fantasma reticente, en uno más de sus espectrales personajes’ (García Bonilla 291).

Rulfo's brief main texts, the realm of inarticulate tortured mutterings and death, of beautifully poetic yearning and death, were published in an extraordinary decade for Mexican literature between two weighty and supremely articulate literary landmarks by the poet and essayist Octavio Paz, who hated Rulfo and largely abstained from writing about him, and by the brilliant and prolific novelist Carlos Fuentes, who immediately proclaimed the importance of Pedro Páramo and wrote admiringly about it throughout his life. Paz's 1950 El laberinto de la soledad is the culmination of decades of philosophical speculation in Mexico about national identity.