Contos eBook

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) was born and lived in Rio de Janeiro. The only time he left the city, in 1879, to convalesce from an epilepsy crisis, was to Nova Friburgo. This stay became literarily famous for having begun there — dictating it to his wife, Carolina — Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, a singularly extravagant book that marks all his work. A descendant of slaves (his father, a wall painter, was the son of freed slaves; his mother, an Azorean washerwoman), poor, orphaned at an early age, had no formal education and was a civil servant, but, despite having emerged as the most eccentric writer that Brazil had ever known, he soon achieved an enormous literary reputation, founding and presiding over the Brazilian Academy of Letters. He was the most complete nineteenth-century man of letters in Brazil, writing in various genres, but standing out as a novelist, short story writer and chronicler. His novels still surprise by their topicality, by the unexpectedness of philosophical humorism and by cosmopolitanism. He seems never to have been so esteemed by his peers as he was admired by them, which would be unfair to attribute to the exceptional configuration of his literary genius.