摄影师不详 · 为公有领域
21 June 1839 – 29 September 1908
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis · 巴西
19th-century Brazilian novelist, poet, and short-story writer, recognised as Brazil's greatest writer and first president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.
Born on 21 June 1839 in Morro do Livramento, Rio de Janeiro, into a poor mixed-race family whose forebears were freed slaves, he never attended university and taught himself French, English, German, and Greek; from age 17 he worked as a printer's apprentice and began publishing; *The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas* (1881) marked the beginning of his mature realist period, followed by *Quincas Borba* (1891), *Dom Casmurro* (1899), and others; in 1897 he founded the Brazilian Academy of Letters and served as its first president until his death; he died in Rio de Janeiro on 29 September 1908.
People & stories
Places in their life
Birthplace, place of life, and place of death all Rio de Janeiro (his late home in the Cosme Velho district is the source of his nickname "the Wizard of Cosme Velho"); place of activity the Brazilian Academy of Letters.
People
Cultural significance
With irony, unreliable narrators, and a cool dissection of Rio's bourgeois society, he anticipated many techniques of the 20th-century modern novel; the Machado de Assis Prize of the Brazilian Academy of Letters is Brazil's most prestigious literary award.
