Machado de Assis, the great brazilian writer was the son of a house painter of mixed black and Portuguese ancestry. He was raised, after his mother's death, by a stepmother, also of mixed parentage. Sickly, epileptic, unprepossessing in appearance, and a stutterer, he found employment at the age of 17 as a printer's apprentice and began to write in his spare time. Soon he was publishing stories, poems, and novels in the Romantic tradition. By 1869 Machado was a typically successful Brazilian man of letters, comfortably provided for by a government position and happily married to a cultured woman, Carolina Augusta Xavier de Novais. In that year illness forced him to withdraw from his active career. He emerged from this temporary retreat with a new novel in a strikingly original style that marked a clear break with the literary conventions of the day. This was Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881; "The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas"; Epitaph of a Small Winner, 1952), an eccentric first-person narrative with a flow of free association and digression. The "small winner," Brás Cubas, cynically reviews his life in 160 short, often disconnected chapters. Machado's reputation of being among the greatest of Brazilian writers rests on this work, his short stories, and two later novels Quincas borba (1891; Philosopher or Dog?, 1954) and his masterpiece, Dom Casmurro (1899; Eng. trans., 1953), a haunting and terrible journey into a mind warped by jealousy. Translations into English of his shorter fiction included The Devil's Church, and Other Stories (1977), The Psychiatrist, and Other Stories (1963), A Chapter of Hats: Selected Stories (2008), and The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis (2018). Urbane, aristocratic, cosmopolitan, aloof, and cynical, Machado used an indirect style in his fiction that could confound later scholars and critics attempting to determine his level of social engagement. One generation of critics might argue that he ignored such social questions as Brazilian independence and the abolition of slavery; a subsequent generation could find evidence of the opposite. His worldview tempered what might be called a "typical" contemporary Brazilian enthusiasm for local colour and self-conscious nationalism, but the locale of his fiction is usually a keenly observed Rio, which he took for granted as though there were no other place. The natural world is practically nonexistent in his work. His writing shows a deep-rooted pessimism and disillusionment that would be unbearable were it not disguised by flippancy and wit. When the Brazilian Academy of letters was founded in 1897, Machado de Assis was unanimously elected president and held the position until his death. Oliveira Lima, who lectured at Harvard during the college season of 1915-1916, and who is himself one of the great intellectual forces of contemporary Brazil, has written of Machado de Assis: "By his extraordinary talent as writer, by his profound literary dignity, by the unity of a life that was entirely devoted to the cult of intellectual beauty, and by the prestige exerted about him by his work and by his personality, Machado de Assis succeeded, despite a nature that was averse to acclaim and little inclined to public appearance, in being considered and respected as the first among his country's men-of-letters: the head, if that word can denote the idea, of a youthful literature which already possesses its traditions and cherishes above all its glories ... His life was one of the most regulated and peaceful after he had given up active journalism, for like so many others, he began his career as a political reporter, paragrapher and dramatic critic. "
