Rulfo was born as Juan Nepomuceno Carlos Pérez Vizcaíno in Apulco, Jalisco (although he was registered at Sayula, Jalisco), in the home of his paternal grandfather. After his father was killed in 1923 and after his mother's death in 1927, his grandmother raised him in the town of San Gabriel, Jalisco. Their extended family consisted of landowners whose fortunes were ruined by the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero War of 1926-28, a Roman Catholic integralist counter-revolt against the government of Mexico following the Mexican Revolution.

Rulfo's mother died from a heart attack in November 1927, when he was ten; his two uncles died a year later. Juan Rulfo had just been sent to a study in the Luis Silva School, where he lived from 1928 to 1932. He completed six years of elementary school and a special seventh year from which he graduated as a bookkeeper, though he never practiced that profession. Rulfo attended a seminary (analogous to a secondary school) from 1932 to 1934, but did not attend a university afterwards??both because the University of Guadalajara was closed due to a strike and because he had not taken preparatory school courses. Instead, Rulfo moved to Mexico City, where he first entered the National Military Academy, which he left after three months, and then he hoped to study law at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. In 1936, Rulfo was able to audit courses in literature there because he obtained a job as an immigration file clerk through his uncle, David Pérez Rulfo, a colonel working for the government, who had also gotten him admitted to the military academy.

It was there that Rulfo first began writing under the tutelage of a co-worker, Efrén Hernández. In 1944 Rulfo had co-founded the literary journal Pan. Later he was able to advance in his position, and he traveled Mexico as an immigration agent. In 1946 he started as a foreman for Goodrich Euzkadi, but his mild temperament led him to prefer working as a wholesale traveling sales agent. This obligated him to travel throughout all of southern Mexico, until he was fired in 1952 for asking for a radio for his company car.

He married Clara Angelina Aparicio Reyes (Mexico City, August 12th, 1928) in Guadalajara, Jalisco, on April 24th, 1948; they had four children, Claudia Berenice (Mexico City, January 29th, 1949), Juan Francisco (Guadalajara, Jalisco, December 13th, 1950), Juan Pablo (México City, April 18th,1955) and Juan Carlos Rulfo (México City, January 24th, 1964). Juan Rulfo obtained a fellowship at the Centro Mexicano de Escritores, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. There, between 1952 and 1954, he was able to write the two books that would make him famous.

The first book was a collection of harshly realistic short stories titled El Llano en llamas (1953). The stories centered around life in rural Mexico around the time of the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero Rebellion. Among the best-known stories are "¡Diles que no me maten!" ("Tell Them Not To Kill Me!"), about an old man, set to be executed, whose prison guard happens to be the son of a man he killed; and "¿No oyes ladrar los perros?" ("Don't You Hear the Dogs Bark?"), about a man carrying his estranged, adult, wounded son on his back to find a doctor.

The second book was Pedro Páramo (1955) a short novel about a man named Juan Preciado who travels to his recently deceased mother's hometown, Comala, to find his father, only to come across a literal ghost town - populated, that is, by spectral figures. Initially, the novel met with cool critical reception and sold only two thousand copies during the first four years; later, however, the book became highly acclaimed. Páramo was a key influence of Latin American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez.

The book went through several changes in name. In two letters written in 1947 to his fiancée Clara Aparicio he refers to the title of this work he was writing then as Una estrella junto a la luna (A Star Next to the Moon), saying that it was causing him some work. During the last stages of writing, he wrote in journals that the title would be Los murmullos (The Murmurs), a title that demonstrates the inspiration of the novels The Wild Palms and If I Forget Thee Jerusalem by William Faulkner, and thanks to a grant from the Centro Mexicano de Escritores Rulfo was able to finish the writing between 1953 and 1954 and publish it in 1955.

Gabriel García Márquez has said that he felt blocked as a novelist after writing his first four books, and that it was only his life-changing discovery of Pedro Páramo in 1961 that opened his way to the composition of his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude. He noted that all of Rulfo's published writing, put together, "add up to no more than 300 pages; but that is almost as many, and I believe they are as durable, as the pages that have come down to us from Sophocles."

After the publication of his two famous books, Rulfo virtually ceased writing narrative fiction, but in other ways he remained a major figure in the Mexican literary world. He began writing screenplays for film and television in 1956; he collaborated with Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez on one of his best-known screenplays, which was made into the classic Mexican film "El gallo de oro" (1964). Rulfo even tried his hand at acting in one film, En este pueblo no hay ladrones (1965).

He was also an accomplished photographer, though few of his photographs were published in his lifetime. He had shown an exhibition in Guadalajara in 1960, but it was not until 1980, when his photographs were shown during his Homage in the Palacio de Bellas Artes, that his fame increased. Currently there are many books of his photographs, which are also shown in exhibitions around the world by the Rulfo Foundation. In addition, from 1962 until his death, Rulfo served as the director and head editor of the publishing department of INI, the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (National Indigenist Institute), a Mexican government agency. Under Rulfo, INI published a remarkable series of photography books documenting the lives of contemporary Mexican indigenous communities.

In the 1960s, Rulfo claimed to be working on a second novel entitled La cordillera, which dealt with the Cristero Revolt in the state of Jalisco, but he said he destroyed it without ever having published it or shown it to anyone else. Only a few passages and an outline of the book remain, published posthumously in his transcribed notebooks.

| NAME = Rulfo, Juan| ALTERNATIVE NAMES =| SHORT DESCRIPTION =| DATE OF BIRTH = May 16, 1917| PLACE OF BIRTH = Sayula, Jalisco, Mexico| DATE OF DEATH = 1986-01-07| PLACE OF DEATH = Mexico City}}

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