[4] From 1906 until 1909, Maluenda was Secretary of Commissions for the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Chile, working under José Toribio Medina.
[4] In 1909, Maluenda published his first book, Escenas de la vida campesina, a collection of short stories.
[4] These included "No Pancho", a revised version of "Rebelión";[5] "En el rodeo," which he had previously read aloud in sessions at the Ateneo de Santiago;[4][6] and "El gañan", which won first place in a literary competition organized by the journal Letras y Ciencias Sociales (from Tucumán, Argentina) and directed by Ricardo Jaimes Freyre.
[4] In 1911, he became editor for Zig-Zag and El Diario Ilustrado [es];[4] he gained the latter job after examining the University of Chile's budget and discovering that the rector and subsecretary of instruction were embezzling.
[2] There he collaborated with the magazine Sucesos [es], publishing a series of short stories that would later become the 1937 collection Colmena urbana.
[3] In 1919, he was asked by Arturo Alessandri to lead the journalism campaign for his 1920 presidential candidacy,[2][4][7] for which he wrote a page in El Mercurio.
[7] In 1928, he became advisory secretary for the newly established Chilean embassy in Peru; while there, he wrote articles for El Mercurio about the customs of Limans that he would later use while writing Armiño negro.
[7] He travelled to Montevideo in 1933 and Buenos Aires in 1936 to cover the Seventh and Eighth Pan-American Conferences for El Mercurio,[4] meeting Franklin Roosevelt at the latter.
[7] In 1942, he attended the Conference of Chancellors in Rio de Janeiro, where American republics severed ties with the Axis powers.