Machado de Assis

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis was born on the twenty-first of June 1839 in Rio de Janeiro, the grandson of freed slaves on his father's side. His father Francisco was a mulatto house-painter; his mother Maria Leopoldina was a Portuguese laundress from the Azores. He was born in a house on the grounds of the Livramento estate of the Senhora do Engenho, who served as his godmother. Both parents died of tuberculosis by the time he was ten and a half.

He had no formal schooling beyond a few years at a public day-school. He taught himself French as a teenaged typesetter at the Imperial National Press, learned Portuguese poetry from public readings at the bookshop of the publisher Paula Brito, and at seventeen published his first poem in the journal Marmota Fluminense. He suffered all his life from severe epilepsy, an acute stammer and chronic poor sight. He was a Black man without a degree and an epileptic, and he became one of the most decorated civil servants of the Empire and the Republic that followed it.

Across forty-five years he published nine novels — including Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881), Quincas Borba (1891) and Dom Casmurro (1899) — more than two hundred short stories, plays, criticism and poetry. The post-1880 novels constitute one of the great prose achievements of the nineteenth century; Brás Cubas is narrated from beyond the grave by a dead man without prospect of redemption, and Dom Casmurro turns on a question of adultery that the text refuses ever to resolve.

In 1897 he founded the Brazilian Academy of Letters and served as its first president until his death on the twenty-ninth of September 1908 in Rio. He had married for thirty-five years the Portuguese-born Carolina Augusta Xavier de Novais, who predeceased him by four years.

He is honored here as the greatest prose writer Latin America produced in the nineteenth century.