Books
Machado de Assis
Machado de Assis was born in Rio de Janeiro as the son of a black house painter and a Portuguese woman. He received little formal education. Machado worked as a printer's apprentice at the National Press from 1854 to 1864, and later he was a salesman and a proofreader at Paulo Brito Bookshop. During these years he started to write stories, poems, and novels. He published his first works in periodicals including A Marmota Fluminense, Correio Mercantil, Diário do Rio de Janeiro, and A Semana Ilustrada. As a poet, Machado de Assis began to gain fame in his mid-twenties. From 1862 to 1864 Machado de Assis was a member and a censor of Conservatório Dramático Brasileiro. By the late 1860s he had became a successful Brazilian man of letters. In 1897 he founded and became first president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.
Machado was a great brazilian novelist and poet, whose career brought him from the lower social classes to intellectual elite, and who often satirized bourgeois values and behavior. Machado de Assis' work reflects the trends of several European literary movements of 19th-century, including romanticism, realism, naturalism, impressionism, and symbolism. He had written nine novels, eight short-story collections, four volumes of poetry, 13 plays, and numerous critical essays. Machado de Assis was afflicted by epilepsy and he rarely traveled outside his native city. He died on September 29, 1908.
Machado de Assis was a sharp observer of human mind and revealed its dark sides. He shared with many authors of his period a reformist concern, but his view was colored with irony and skepticism concerning the 'Naturalist documentary method' and the possibility of human goodness. He explored the interaction between Europe and Brazil and the local adoption of European models but avoided regionalism. Irony was for him a vehicle for social criticism - especially sensitive he was about the plight of women.
For more information, please click the following sources.
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/machado.htm
http://www.fll.purdue.edu/publications/espelho/Who.html
http://www.paubrasil.com.br/machado/
http://www.academia.org.br/machado.htm
