García Márquez's early short stories were written in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the author was in his early twenties. Many of them, including "The Woman Who Came at Six O'Clock" (1950), were published in the Bogotá, Columbia, daily publication, El espectador. However, it was not until the author achieved fame through novels like One Hundred Years of Solitude that his earliest short stories were reprinted and translated into different short story collections, thereby reaching a wider audience. It was at this point that critics began to notice the stories.

Although "The Woman Who Came at Six O'Clock" was first collected in Ojos de perro azul (translated as Eyes of a Blue Dog) in 1972, most reviewers didn't notice the story until it reappeared in Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories (1978) and Collected Stories (1984).

"The Woman Who Came at Six...