He is best known for two literary works, the 1955 novel Pedro Páramo, and the collection of short stories El Llano en llamas (1953).

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.

[citation needed] Rulfo obtained a fellowship at the Centro Mexicano de Escritores, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation.

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.

In two letters written in 1947 to his fiancée Clara Aparicio, he refers to the novel he was writing as Una estrella junto a la luna (A Star Next to the Moon), saying that it was causing him some trouble.

In passages of the novel Pedro Páramo, the influence of American novelist William Faulkner is notorious, according to Rulfo's former friend, philologist Antonio Alatorre, in an interview with the latter made by journalists of Mexican newspaper El Universal in November 1998, which was published on 31 October 2010.

[8] Between 1956 and 1958, Rulfo worked on a novella entitled El gallo de oro [es] (The Golden Cockerel), which was not published until 1980.

[9] Rulfo told interviewer Luis Harss that he had written and destroyed an earlier novel set in Mexico City.

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 the way to the composition of his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude.