Alberto Masferrer was one of the most outstanding writers who had El Salvador throughout the history. Alberto Masferrer was born in the year of 1868 in the town of Tecapa (today called City joy) in the Department of Usulután.
He was regarded as an autodidact, i.e. a curious person who decides to learn if same what calls attention; so when they asked him where he had studied, he answered in the “University of life”. Throughout his life, Masferrer lived in several Central American capitals and toured Chile, New York and Europe. He was also Consul in San José de Costa Rica and Belgium.
Masferrer was a somewhat controversial due to their reformist ideas quite different to what it was customary in his time and his participation in the political sphere.
He was a teacher, journalist, essayist and a writer who managed to touch several genres that made him earn the respect and admiration of the majority of Salvadorans of this century as Claudia Lars, Miguel Angel Espino and Salarrué writers and intellectuals.
His thought is summed up in a concept called “Vitalism”, whose meaning is that each individual has the right to a “vital minimum” (minimum of life) in regards to housing, food, work and education. Masferrer advocated peaceful struggle – as Gandhi-. and used journalism as a pulpit to preach their ideas by founding managing the homeland newspaper between 1928 and 1930. Was ideologue and Director of the political campaign that led to the power to engineer Arturo Araujo – in 1930. But having been Masferrer chosen by the popular vote as a member of the National Assembly of time soon he felt betrayed by Arturo Araujo.
That same thought reformist and non-violent wrecked between the forces that are directly in the peasant insurrection of 1932 and which culminated with the massacre of between 10 and 30 thousand Indians and peasants and the rise of the dictatorial Government of General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez. Books and Masferreriana ideology were considered Communist thinking and Masferrer, fearing for his life, auto-expatrió in 1932. That same year, on 8 September, don Alberto Masferrer dies alone, defeated – and virtually deported – in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.
It was a passionate writer of books, so it is not surprising to consider education as the hub for social change; Read and write essays and the culture by means of the book prove it. Also fueemoralista. and published Verses, a surprising short novel-“Una Vida en El Cine” (1922) – and numerous essays grouped in different volumes: what should we know?, the Vital Minimum, the seven strings of the lyre, essay on the destiny, the damn money, book of the Bida, studies yFfiguraciones about the life of Jesus, the Mission of America, among others.
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