Biographical Note
Jorge Amado, Brazil's all-time best-selling author, was born 10 August
1912 in Itabuna, Bahia, Brazil, the son of Joao Amado de Faria (a cacao
plantation owner) and Eulalia (Leal) Amado. He married Matilde Garcia Rosa,
1933 (divorced, 1944), and Zélia Gattai, 14 July 1945, with whom he had
two children, Joao Jorge and Paloma. Amado attended a Jesuit boarding school,
and received his J.D. in 1935 from Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
Amado began his writing career as a reporter for
Diario da Bahia, Bahai, Brazil, in1927. Amado published
his first novel,
O paiz do carnaval (1931), when he was nineteen. His
second novel,
Cacau (1933), made evident his political leanings and
interest in the newly formed Brazilian Communist Party. He was imprisoned for
political reasons in 1935. His adversarial relationship with the Brazilian
government continued, and in 1937 the government staged a public book burning
in which the majority of books destroyed were Amado's. He went into exile in
1937, and 1941-1943. Following his appointment as federal deputy of Brazilian
parliament, 1946-1948, on the Communist Party ticket he was again exiled from
1948-1952 where he lived in France and Czechoslovakia, then returned to Brazil
again in 1952. After Joseph Stalin's death there was much debate over the
future and ideological position of the Brazilian Communist Party. In 1955 Amado
left the party, and from then on his relationship with communism was ambiguous.
His writing underwent a significant change, becoming less political and more
universally recognized by critics. Subsequently, Amado became the editor of
Para Todos a cultural periodical in Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil, 1956-1959. During the fall of 1971 Amado came to America as a visiting
fellow at the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies at Pennsylvania
State University.
Amado became a well-loved national and much-acclaimed international
novelist. He has published novels, short stories, and nonfiction including
travel and memoir. Nineteen of Amado's novels have been translated from the
original Portuguese into English, and his works have been translated into
French, Spanish, Russian, and numerous other languages.
Contemporary Authors Online notes that Amado is ranked by
some critics as Brazil's greatest twentieth-century novelist, and certainly was
the most widely read. His depictions of the social, political, and cultural
aspects of Brazil's northwestern Bahia region have been translated into as many
as fifty languages. Amado wrote with the eye of a social realist; his early
work was politically inflammatory and evoked a poverty-stricken land afflicted
by brutal government management. In his later novels Amado mellowed his
political approach--still depicting the underclass, but with informed
compassion and humor.
Through the 1990s to his death in 2001, Bahia's leading literary
authority continually painted a lyrical image of his homeland, aggrandizing
Brazil's downtrodden in rollicking tales of passion and mystique. Two of his
later novels,
Tent of Miracles and
Tieta, the Goat Girl; or, The Return of the Prodigal
Daughter, were reprinted in honor of the writer, and "continue his
undying concern for the future of Brazil," according to Sophia A. McClennen in
Review of Contemporary Fiction. "Rich in narrative
structure and remarkable in the description of Brazilian plenitude, these
novels are smart, witty, and fun," McClennen continued, adding that the
fictions characterize Amado's transition, after the mid-twentieth century,
"from more overtly political narrative to writing that was full of excess,
sensual delight, and the richness of everyday life."
Amado won numerous literary prizes including Stalin International
Peace Prize, 1951; National Literary Prize (Brazil), 1958; Calouste Gulbenkian
Prize, Academie du Monde Latin, 1971; Italian-Latin American Institute Prize,
1976; Nonnino literary Prize (Italy), 1983; candidate for Neustadt
International Prize for Literature, 1984; Neruda Prize, and Volterra Prize
(Italy), 1989; Sino del Duca Prize (Paris), and Mediterranean Prize, 1990. He
was named commander, Legion d'Honneur (France).
He died 6 August 2001, in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, of a heart
attack.
