Machado de Assis

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis was born on 21 June 1839 in Rio de Janeiro to Francisco José de Assis, a house painter and the son of freed slaves, and Maria Leopoldina da Câmara Machado, a Portuguese washerwoman from the Azores, and was raised by a stepmother after his mother's death.

Largely self-taught, and overcoming epilepsy and a stutter, Machado began working as a printer's apprentice at 17, writing poetry and theatre criticism in his spare time, gradually building a reputation as a man of letters while supporting himself through a government position at the Ministry of Agriculture, where he served until his death without ever missing a day of work.

Machado's mature fiction, beginning with his 1881 novel Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas, revolutionised Brazilian literature through its innovative first-person narration, free association and digression, narrated by a character who addresses the reader from beyond the grave.

He went on to write Quincas Borba in 1891 and his masterpiece Dom Casmurro in 1899, a haunting psychological novel exploring jealousy and unreliable narration, works now regarded among the greatest achievements in world literature, rooted in European literary traditions while transcending the Brazilian literary schools of his era.

In 1896 Machado became the founding president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, a position he held until his death in 1908; although his work remained comparatively little known outside Brazil for decades, he is now widely regarded as the greatest writer in the history of Brazilian literature and a pioneering figure of realism and psychological fiction.