Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), educated in Durban, South Africa where he mastered the English language, returned to Lisbon at seventeen, living a quiet bachelor life as a commercial translator of foreign business correspondence in the downtown Baixa district. Sipping bica coffee at the Café A Brasileira, Pessoa waged literature's most radical experiment in fractured identity.

Rather than using simple pseudonyms, Pessoa invented heteronyms: complete alternate literary personalities with distinct biographies, astrological charts, poetic styles, philosophies, and even physical appearances. Under pagan pastoralist Alberto Caeiro, classical Stoic Ricardo Reis, futurist engineer Álvaro de Campos, and assistant bookkeeper Bernardo Soares (author of the hypnotic, fragmentary existential masterpiece Livro do Desassossego / The Book of Disquiet), Pessoa created an entire modern literature within his own soul. When he died of cirrhosis at forty-seven, he left behind a legendary wooden trunk stuffed with over 27,000 unorganized manuscript fragments.