RULFO, JUAN (PEREZ)

born May 16, 1918, Sayula, Mex. died Jan. 7, 1986, Mexico City Mexican writer who was important in the development of the magic realism school of Latin-American fiction. As a child growing up in the rural countryside, he witnessed the horrors of the later Cristero uprisings of 192629. His family of prosperous landowners lost a considerable fortune. When they moved to Mexico City, Rulfo worked for a rubber company and as a film script writer. Many of the short stories that were later published in El llano en llamas (1953; The Burning Plain, 1967) first appeared in the review Pan; they depict the violence of the rural environment and the moral stagnation of its people. In them Rulfo first used narrative techniques that later would be incorporated into the Latin-American new novel, such as the use of interior monologue, stream of consciousness, flashbacks, and shifting points of view. Pedro Pramo (1955; Eng. trans., 1959) treats of the physical and moral disintegration of a laconic cacique (boss) and is set in a mythical hell on earth inhabited by dead individuals who are constantly haunted by their past transgressions. From 1933 Rulfo lived in Mexico City. He became director of the editorial department of the National Institute for Indigenous Studies and advised young writers at the Centro Mexicano de Escritores (Centre for Mexican Authors).