When Machado de Assis died on September 29th, 1908 in Rio de Janeiro (a city he never left) he was already a widely acclaimed writer. The first president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, he left behind nine novels, several considered among the greatest masterpieces of the Portuguese language. He was also a poet, a playwright, a journalist and the translator of many French and English classics, including the works of Flaubert and Shakespeare. Since his death, his fame has steadily increased, and today there are literary critics worldwide dedicated to studying his works. They emphasize the unique character of his writings, which went beyond the literary models of his day and truly crossed borders and explored universal themes. Harold Bloom has called him one of the 100 geniuses of literature, placing him alongside Dante, Shakespeare and Cervantes.

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis was born on June 21, 1839, in  Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Self-educated, he came from humble origins: his father was a mulatto housepainter, the descendant of a freed slave. His mother, who died during Machado’s childhood, was a white Portuguese washerwoman from the Azores.  His contact with the literary milieu started at the National Printing Office, where he was admitted at the age of 17 as an apprentice typesetter. Two years later, he became a journalist and started publishing short stories in the literary magazines of Rio de Janeiro, then the capital of the Brazilian Empire.

At the beginning of his literary career Machado de Assis used Romanticism as his model, as can be seen in his first novel, Resurrection, published in 1872. He abandoned the style with the novel Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas, 1881), which helped establish his reputation as a great writer. Although aligned with Realism, the novel exceeded all of the rules of that school. According to Michael Wood, Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is characterized by a “sudden change of method, the move from graceful, third-person storytelling, to extravagant modernist antics, including tangled time lines, reflexive commentary, digressions, deeply unreliable first-person narrators, proliferating allusions, canceled or incomplete stories, pages filled with dots, idiosyncratic chapter titles, constant references to the bookishness of the books, and teasing addresses to a variety of imaginary readers.”  It is worth noting that he accomplished all of these artistic experiments several decades before the age of Modernism came into full being.  He continued using similar literary craftsmanship in the late phase of his work. To this gilded period belong two of his novels that were translated into English: Philosopher or Dog? (Quincas Borba, 1891) and Dom Casmurro (1899).

Machado de Assis’ melancholic and pessimistic literary creations did not correspond to his stable emotional life. He was married to the same woman, the cultured Portuguese Carolina Augusta Xavier de Novais, for 35 years (until her death). The two sides of his personality – on the one hand the quiet, mild-mannered and efficient public servant of the Brazilian Empire, and on the other hand, the literate, witty and implacable critic of the aristocratic rules that dictated norms in the society in which he lived -- gave him the nickname of the witch doctor of Cosme Velho, the Rio de Janeiro neighborhood where he lived with Carolina and where he died, at the age of 79, leaving behind a body of work consisting of 31 volumes. His novels are constantly being translated and are presently included in the canon of the World Literature.