For Álvaro Mutis, the impressions of these early years, his reading of Jules Verne and of Pablo Neruda's Residencia en la tierra, and, especially, contact with "el trópico" (the tropics), are the mainspring of his work.

Mutis studied high school at the Colegio Mayor de Nuestra Señora del Rosario in Bogotá under the tutelage of the Colombian poet Eduardo Carranza.

From 1956 on, he lived in Mexico City, gaining renown there as the result of the positive reviews of his work by Octavio Paz, who was a champion of Mutis' early poetry.

In the 1950s, Mutis spent 15 months in a Mexican prison Palacio de Lecumberri as a consequence of his handling of money that had been set aside for charitable use by Standard Oil.

He had been using the money to help his friends who were under threat from the military dictatorship in Colombia, and after he fled to Mexico, the Mexican government bowed to Colombian pressure and had him imprisoned.

[citation needed] Mutis' close friend, Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez, called him "one of the greatest writers of our time.