Salarrué

Who was Salarrué?

Salvador Efraín Salazar Arrué, known as Salarrué, was a Salvadoran writer, poet and painter

Born in Sonsonate to a well-off family, Salarrué trained as a painter at the Corcoran School of Art, in Washington, D.C., from 1916 to 1919. He then returned to El Salvador and, in 1922, married fellow painter Zélie Lardé, with whom he had three daughters. In the late 1920s he worked as editor for the newspaper Patria, owned by Alberto Masferrer, an important Salvadoran intellectual. To fill in blank spaces in the newspaper, Salarrué wrote a series of short stories which were collected thirty years later as Cuentos de Cipotes. These and the stories in Cuentos de Barro became Salarrué's most popular and enduring work, reflecting an idealized version of rural life in El Salvador and making him one of the founders of the new wave of Latin American folkloric narrative.

Salarrué lived in the United States from 1947 to 1951 while representing his country in diplomatic posts. He died in Los Planes de Renderos, near San Salvador, and is buried in the Cementerio de los Ilustres.