Machado de Assis

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908) is universally recognized as Brazil's greatest writer and one of the supreme masters of 19th-century world literature. Born into poverty on Morro do Livramento in Rio de Janeiro as the mixed-race grandson of freed slaves, he was largely self-educated while working as a typesetter, journalist, and civil servant in the Ministry of Agriculture.

Machado founded and served as the lifelong president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. In 1881, he published The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (Epitaph of a Small Winner), narrated from beyond the grave with Laurence Sterne-like digressive irony, overturning literary realism decades ahead of European modernism. His 1899 psychological masterpiece Dom Casmurro created one of world literature's most enigmatic and debated love mysteries surrounding Capitu's alleged infidelity.