Machado de Assis

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis was born in 1839 on a hill outside Rio de Janeiro; his father, a house painter, was descended from freed slaves, and his mother, an immigrant from the Portuguese Azores, died early. Of mixed race, epileptic and afflicted with a stammer, he had almost no formal schooling and taught himself French, English and German. As a boy he was apprenticed in a printing house; he became a proofreader and journalist, then entered government service, rising step by step to a senior post in the Ministry of Agriculture. He began with poems and theatre criticism; at forty a grave illness nearly blinded him, and after his recovery his manner changed radically, producing a series of novels famous for their cool irony and psychological insight. In 1897 he founded the Brazilian Academy of Letters and was its first president until his death. He is acknowledged as Brazil's greatest writer and one of the most modern novelists of nineteenth-century world literature.