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Studying the right wing – or, in a broader sense, conservatism – in Brazil is not an easy task. This is even more the case when it comes to the field of culture, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. The undeniable rise of the left in artistic creation overshadowed a conservative cultural elite that was, however, very active from the Vargas dictatorship until the military regime. Identifying the intellectuals of this elite from the itineraries of its members, their networks and their spaces of sociability is the first objective of this article. The second is to draw a profile of these little known or forgotten actors of Brazilian politics in the 1960s and 1970s. For this, we conducted a case study: a prosopography of members of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, between 1961 and 1979, thereby identifying places of birth, social origins, research undertaken, activities performed, places of sociability frequented, and political and administrative positions held. In addition to revealing a significant sector of the Brazilian intellectual field of the 1960s and 1970s – coming largely from the same generation, which we designate here the « generation of 1922 », best known for its role in the cultural renewal of the 1920s and their participation in Vargas’s dictatorship – the use of prosopography allowed us to capture the formation of this network and give a more detailed view of the relationships between its members, on the one hand, and to political power, on the other.