Machado de Assis

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (Rio de Janeiro, 1839–1908) was a Brazilian novelist, poet, playwright and short-story writer, and is generally regarded as the greatest name in Brazilian literature. He wrote in Portuguese during the years when the empire gave way to the republic. His work marks Brazil's move from Romanticism to Realism.

He came from a poor family in Rio. His father was a house painter of freed-slave descent and his mother was a Portuguese laundress, and she died when he was still a boy. He had little formal schooling. He taught himself French, partly from an immigrant baker, and later English, German and, in old age, Greek. He began working in print shops and newspapers, and at fifteen he published his first poem in a magazine. Over the years he climbed the civil service, first in the Ministry of Agriculture, Commerce and Public Works, and Emperor Pedro II gave him a post and an honour.

His early novels, including Ressurreição, A Mão e a Luva, Helena and Iaiá Garcia, were popular, though critics thought little of them. Around 1881, Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas changed his tone. Its narrator is a dead man, and the book is full of irony and scepticism about human vanity. Quincas Borba, Dom Casmurro and Esaú e Jacó followed, novels in which ambiguity and humour replace sentimental storytelling. He also wrote short stories, poems and chronicles. Some contemporaries, such as José do Patrocínio and Lima Barreto, criticised his distance from politics and from the abolitionist cause.

His wife Carolina died in 1904, and he lived out his last years alone and melancholy until his death in 1908. He was the first president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, founded in 1897 with other intellectuals. His influence reached Olavo Bilac, Lima Barreto, Carlos Drummond de Andrade and the American novelist John Barth. Today he is placed beside Dante, Shakespeare and Camões among the great names of world literature.