He wrote Pedro Paramo, which Gabriel Garcia Marquez said he could recite by heart. Juan Rulfo wrote one novel — about a man who goes to a ghost town to find his dead father — and one short story collection, and then almost nothing else for thirty years. He worked as a government archivist. Garcia Marquez, Borges, and Fuentes credited him as an essential influence. He died in Mexico City in 1986. The collected fiction takes up about 300 pages. Thirty pages per decade of active creative life. Every page immaculate.
January 7, 1986
40 years ago
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