often employed themes of fantasy and of Eastern religion. Though the members of this generation of writers did not always have direct links with the military dictatorship installed in 1931, their conception of national culture as a negation of an enlightened ideal helped legitimate the new order. The idealization of the traditional peasant and his solitary link with nature permitted the association of authoritarianism with populism, which was essential to the emerging discourse of the military dictatorship. The 1944 generation and anti-authoritarianism The 1940s saw the emergence of a group of writers including Pedro Geoffroy Rivas (1908–1979), Hugo Lindo (1917–1985), José María Méndez (b. 1916), Matilde Elena López (b. 1922), Joaquín Hernández Callejas (1915–2000), Julio Fausto Fernández, Oswaldo Escobar Velado, Luis Gallegos Valdés, Antonio Gamero, Ricardo Trigueros de León, and Pedro Quiteno (1898–1962). Pedro Geoffroy Rivas produced lyrical literature marked by avant-gardism and played an important role in the rescue of indigenous traditions and popular language. The poetry of Oswaldo Escobar Velado was characterized by existentialism and the denouncing of social injustices. José María Méndez and Hugo Lindo explored new frontiers in fiction. Many writings of this generation played an active role in the democratic movement that ended the dictatorship of Hernández Martínez. However, some writers actively collaborated with the regime of Óscar Osorio. As part of a modernization project, Osoria promoted one of the most ambitious cultural policies in the history of El Salvador. For example, through the Editorial Department of the Ministry of Culture (later Directorate of Publications, Ministry of Education), under the energetic leadership of the writer Ricardo Trigueros de León, developed editorial work of great range, which was a crucial step in laying the foundations of the canon of literature in El Salvador. In parallel, the culture industry rose and was universalized, a process that would affect the development of literature. By 1950 the media were displacing the fine arts and traditional culture in the popular imagination, and literature was relegated to the margins. This weakness made art an easy hostage for the military regime, increasingly delegitimized by corruption and the lack of political freedom. Literature from the civil war to the present In this convulsive context came a literature that formed the legacy of the writers of the “Compromised Generation." In addition, more literature came that advocated the popular struggles for liberation; these struggles largely defined the chorus of Salvadoran artistic literature that existed from