by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis was born in Rio de Janeiro, in 1839. His parents—his father was a mulatto and his mother a Portuguese immigrant from the Azores—lived as dependents, or agregados, in the household of a wealthy family. Machado himself worked as a journalist, editor, and typesetter before taking a position as a civil servant at the age of 27. He spent his whole life in Rio de Janeiro—then the capital and largest city of Brazil—where he took an active part in the fledgling cultural life. For over 40 years Machado produced a steady stream of poems, criticism, short stories, newspaper columns, translations from English and French, and nine novels. His intellectual peers praised his voluminous work, and elected him the first President of the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 1897, a post that he held until his death...