Juan Rulfo

Rulfo lost his father to the Cristero War's violence when he was six, then lost his mother soon after; an uncle's household and a Guadalajara seminary raised him on grief and Catholic ritual he later turned into fiction. He worked for years as an immigration agent and a tire-company traveling salesman before finding time to write, publishing seventeen stories as The Burning Plain in 1953.

Two years later Pedro Páramo appeared to confused reviews and modest sales; recognition built slowly until García Márquez, stuck for years on his own novel, read it and found permission to write One Hundred Years of Solitude. Rulfo then simply stopped, explaining that an uncle who supplied his best material had died and taken the rest of the stories with him.

He spent his last decades directing Mexico's National Indigenous Institute, recording oral histories instead of writing his own, and received the National Prize for Arts and Sciences before his death in Mexico City in 1986.