Correio de Manhã, September 30, 1908: “Machado de Assis has died. Our language loses one of its most spirited and profound writers. With him goes the lightest and most enchanting of our prose, the most complete and most perfect of the literary organizations that we possess. Poet, romantic, dramaturge, and journalist, Machado de Assis was the crowning peak and most kind in our world of letters. His loss is irreparable. In a country such as ours, already so lacking in brilliant spirits such as his, his loss is more important than it appears.”
Considered the greatest name in Brazilian literature, Machado de Assis was born in 1839, in the Morro de Livramento favela in Rio de Janeiro. Son of Francisco José Machado de Assis and Leopoldina Machado de Assis, grandson of freed slaves, the writer had a humble childhood; he worked as a printer’s apprentice, editor, and civil servant.
Machado wrote more than twenty novels and theatrical pieces, dozens of short stories, five collections of poems and sonnets, and more than sixty chronicles. The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (1881), Quincas Borba (1891), and Dom Casmurro (1899) are considered by critics to be innovative novels Brazilian literature, which introduced Realism in Brazil.
In 1897, he was one of the founders of the Academia Brasileira de Letras, an institution also known as the Machado de Assis House, as well as its first president.
Machado de Assis died at 69-years old. The death of his wife, 4 years earlier, is considered the cause of the writer’s isolation and the worsening of his health until his death on September 29, 1908.