Carolina Maria de Jesus was born on 14 March 1914 in the rural town of Sacramento, Minas Gerais, Brazil, to a family of sharecroppers and descendants of enslaved people, and only received a few years of schooling, paid for by her mother's landowner, before her education ended at the second grade.
After her mother's death in 1937, de Jesus migrated to São Paulo, where she settled in the Canindé favela and raised her three children alone, supporting the family by scavenging and reselling paper and other recyclable materials from the streets each day.
Throughout this period of extreme poverty, de Jesus secretly filled notebooks with diary entries documenting the hunger, violence and daily struggles of favela life, writing candidly and proudly as a self-identified Black woman at a time when such perspectives were rarely published in Brazil.
In 1958 journalist Audálio Dantas discovered de Jesus and her notebooks, and in 1960 her diary was published as Quarto de Despejo, becoming an immediate sensation that sold more than 100,000 copies, rivalling the sales of celebrated author Jorge Amado, and was subsequently translated into thirteen languages, including English as Child of the Dark.
Despite her literary success, de Jesus was largely dismissed by Brazil's literary establishment during her lifetime, who considered her writing unpolished, and she eventually returned to poverty and waste-picking before her death in 1977; her work has since been rediscovered and celebrated as a foundational text of Black Brazilian women's literature, inspiring generations of subsequent writers including Conceição Evaristo.
- Published Quarto de Despejo, 1960, selling over 100,000 copies in Brazil
- The only document published in English by a Brazilian slum-dweller of her era
- Her diary was translated into thirteen languages
- Recognised posthumously as a foundational figure of Black Brazilian women's literature
- Subject of ongoing exhibitions, including at the Afro-Brazilian Museum, São Paulo
- A voice from the margins can reshape a nation's literary conversation. De Jesus's diary, written while scavenging paper to survive, became one of the most widely read accounts of favela life in Brazilian history.
- Recognition in one's lifetime is not guaranteed, even after major success. Despite her diary's commercial triumph, Brazil's literary establishment largely dismissed de Jesus, and she returned to poverty before her death.