Vargas Llosa wrote his debut novel while living in Europe with his first wife Julia, whom he had married in 1955 when he was still a teenager. After spending the year 1959 at the Complutense University in Madrid, where he held a bursary for a doctoral research project on modernism, the grant ran out and the couple moved to Paris. Despite holding several jobs simultaneously in order to keep himself afloat, he found time to work on his first novel which had the working titles ‘La morada del héroe’ [The House of the Hero] and ‘Los impostores’ [The Impostors]. In 1962 he entered the finished manuscript into the competition for the Biblioteca Breve award, organized by the Spanish publishing house Seix Barral, and became the first Latin American author to win this literary prize. The following year he published the novel under the title La ciudad y los perros [The Time of the Hero] with Seix Barral. It became an instant success with readers and won the Spanish Critics’ prize as well as coming second in the Prix Formentor, a competition organized by the publisher Carlos Barral who became his friend and mentor.

The novel is based on Vargas Llosa's experiences at the Leoncio Prado military school in Lima where he was a pupil from 1950 to 1951, sent there by his father to eradicate his literary inclinations and make a man out of him, as he has reiterated in many interviews.