Juan Rulfo wrote one novel and one short story collection, and then almost nothing else for thirty years. He worked as a government archivist. That the collected fiction of one of the most influential Latin American writers of the twentieth century takes up about 300 pages is a fact that astonished his contemporaries and continues to astonish everyone who reads him. Born on May 16, 1917, in Apulco, Jalisco, Mexico, Rulfo grew up during the Cristero War, a religious conflict that devastated rural Mexico and killed his father when Rulfo was seven. His mother died when he was ten. He was raised in an orphanage. The landscape of his fiction, dry, depopulated villages full of absent fathers and silent grief, came directly from his childhood. "El Llano en Llamas" (The Burning Plain), his story collection, appeared in 1953. "Pedro Páramo" followed in 1955. The novel tells the story of a man who travels to his mother's hometown to find his father and discovers that everyone he meets is dead. The town is a ghost town. The narrative slips between the living and the dead without announcement. Gabriel García Márquez said he could recite it by heart and called it the finest novel he had ever read. Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa all credited Rulfo as a defining influence. After "Pedro Páramo," Rulfo published almost nothing. He worked at the Instituto Nacional Indigenista, traveled, took photographs of extraordinary quality, and deflected questions about when the next book would come. He died in Mexico City on January 7, 1986. No next book came. The 300 pages he left behind changed an entire continent's literature.