Niterói, 1917 – Rio de Janeiro (Brasil), 1997

By Flávio Aguiar

He began his journalism career at the age of seventeen, an activity that yielded notable reports, including those collected in the volume Vietnã do Norte (1977). Concerned with profound social distortions, he declared in the 1960s that “an intellectual has no right to exempt themselves” from national issues, as evidenced by his fight alongside Darcy Ribeiro in defense of indigenous peoples. He served as a correspondent for the BBC in London during World War II, an experience that inspired the novel Memórias de Aldenham House (1989), marking a fertile dialogue between journalism and literature, which was extensively explored in the 1970s by, among others, Ignácio de Loyola Brandão.

In 1967, he published Quarup, which was read by the generation of leftist revolutionaries who were engaged with Carlos Heitor Cony’s Pessach: a travessia. In his subsequent novels, he examined the actions of political movements (Sempreviva, 1981) and the role of the Latin American intellectual (A expedição Montaigne, 1983), addressing the crisis of the engaged writer.

He was also the author of various plays, including Pedro Mico (1957), one of the first to feature a black protagonist in Brazilian theater, as well as other novels such as Reflexos do baile (1976).