Assis Machado de
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) is widely regarded as among the greatest Brazilian writers of all time. The grandson of freed slaves, he was born to a poor family in Rio de Janeiro and, with little formal education, took work as a typographer's apprentice and began to write and publish at age 15. Machado went on to a successful career as a government bureaucrat and writer of romantic fiction. From the late 1870s his style became more complex and ironic, and he went onto write the...
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