José Cardoso Pires spent his entire life waging an ongoing battle against what he called fragile political memory. Accompanying, then, the process of the author`s fresh interpretation of the history of Portugal after the PIDE (secret police) files were opened, it was possible to learn more about the place that could be occupied in 20th-century Portugal by the writer- intellectual. The dissertation intends to examine the role of intellectual José Cardoso Pires, especially in his portrayal of Portugal in the pages of the novel Ballad of Dogs` Beach, in an effort to create new memories of Salazarism that avert or at least hinder the effectiveness of the policies of forgetting adopted by post-dictatorship governments.