Machado de Assis

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (born June 21, 1839, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil — died September 29, 1908, Rio de Janeiro) was a Brazilian poet, novelist, and short-story writer, a classic master of Brazilian literature, whose art is rooted in the traditions of European culture and transcends the influence of Brazilian literary schools.

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The son of a house painter of mixed black and Portuguese ancestry, he was raised, after his mother’s death, by a stepmother, also of mixed parentage. Sickly, epileptic, unprepossessing in appearance, and a stutterer, he found employment at the age of 17 as a printer’s apprentice and began to write in his spare time. Soon he was publishing stories, poems, and novels in the Romantic tradition.

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Among his novels, Dom Casmurro and The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas are acknowledged masterpieces of world literature. If he had written in French instead of Portuguese, it has been said, he would today be universally recognized as the equal of Flaubert and Hugo.