SOURCE: "Jorge Amado," in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 207, No. 25, June 23, 1975, pp. 20-1.

In the following interview, Amado discusses his presentation of women in his novels and his relationship to his home region of Bahia.

A regionalist who calls himself a materialist, Jorge Amado also describes himself as "a chronicler of the lives of the poor people of Bahia," a state in the northeast of Brazil. American readers know him best as the author of Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon; now, with the publication shortly by Knopf of his latest novel, that audience will discover a different kind of liberated woman in Tereza Batista.

He is a stocky man of medium height, with leonine features that could easily belong to a Greek statue; however, he is not Hellenic but Brazilian—and strongly contemporary in his views about women and men and their sometimes loving, sometimes loathing dialogues. And, perhaps ironically, in...