These and the stories in Cuentos de Barro ("Tales of Clay") 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 (narrativa costumbrista).

By disguising through a subtle use of a non-standard, highly inventive language and style, he was able to recall to readers a bloody massacre carried out by the Salvadoran dictator-president, General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez in 1933, without the authorities being able to interpret Salarrué's defamation of that leader.

They each had literary vocations, but it was Luz, after Miranda, when the family resided in El Salvador, who attained inclusion by the journalist Román Mayorga Rivas in the anthology of poetry "Guirnalda Salvadoreña."

When he was eight his mother's financial difficulty forced her to move; for this reason young Luis alternated between his home in San Salvador and Santa Tecla where he lived in the same residence as his cousins Núñez Arrué, of whom one was Toño Salazar, later a renowned cartoonist.

A partial translation of Cuentos de Barro/Tales of Clay by Salarrué, as accomplished by Nelson Lòpez, is available in a PDF format: And a review or "prologo" in Spanish of that book of English translations by Nelson López is published in Carátula, together with the comparison of the Spanish and English of the story "La botija" / "The Botija" or "jug of gold," in an excellent presentation by Dr. Rafael Lara Martínez in Caratula: Revista Cultural Centramericana: