Amado, Jorge

born Aug. 10, 1912, Ferradas, near Ilhéus, Braz.

died Aug. 6, 2001, Salvador, Bahia

Brazilian novelist.

Amado was born and reared on a cacao plantation. He published his first novel at age 20. His early works, including The Violent Land (1942), explore the exploitation and suffering of plantation workers. Despite imprisonment and exile for leftist activities, he continued to produce novels, many of which have been banned in Brazil and Portugal. Later works such as Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon (1958), Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (1966), and The War of the Saints (1993) preserve Amado's political attitude in their more subtle satire; many of his books were adapted for film and television.

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▪ 2002

      Brazilian novelist (b. Aug. 10, 1912, Ferradas, near Ilhéus, Braz.—d. Aug. 6, 2001, Salvador, Braz.), was the literary patriarch of his country. The first half of his career was characterized by ideological works and the second by humorous, often ribald, novels of Brazilian life. The publication of Amado's second novel, in 1933, led to his being briefly detained, the first of many harassments by the government. This book was followed by others dealing with the exploitation of plantation workers and with the brutality of life in Brazil. He was forced into exile from 1938 to 1942. The masterpiece of his first period was Terras do sem fim (1942; The Violent Land, 1965), an epic novel about the struggles of workers. In 1946 he was elected to Congress as a member of the Communist Party, but two years later the party was banned, and he was again forced into exile. After returning to Brazil in 1952, Amado began to write the novels that made him famous. He became known particularly for his celebration of the Afro-Brazilian culture, including the candomblé religion, of his native Bahia state. He was called the author of “whores and tramps,” a title he embraced. The best known of his later works were Gabriela, cravo e canela (1958; Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, 1962) and Dona Flor e seus dois maridos (1966; Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, 1969). Both were made into films and adapted as soap operas for Brazilian television. To charges that he had abandoned his earlier views, he replied that it was important to portray the dreams of the poor. In all, he published 32 books, which were translated into some 50 languages and sold 20 million copies. Among his many honours were France's Legion of Honor and the Graça Aranha Prize of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.

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▪ Brazilian author

born August 10, 1912, Ferradas, near Ilhéus, Brazil

died August 6, 2001, Salvador

      novelist whose stories of life in the eastern Brazilian state of Bahia won international acclaim.

      Amado grew up on a cacao plantation, Auricídia, and was educated at the Jesuit college in Salvador and studied law at Federal University in Rio de Janeiro. He published his first novel at age 19. Three of his early works deal with the cacao plantations, emphasizing the exploitation and the misery of the migrant blacks, mulattoes, and poor whites who harvest the crop and generally expressing communist solutions to social problems. The best of these works, Terras do sem fim (1942; The Violent Land), about the struggle of rival planters, has the primitive grandeur of a folk saga.

      Amado became a journalist in 1930, and his literary career paralleled a career in radical politics that won him election to the Constituent Assembly as a federal deputy representing the Communist Party of Brazil in 1946. He was imprisoned as early as 1935 and periodically exiled for his leftist activities, and many of his books were banned in Brazil and Portugal. He continued to produce novels with facility, most of them picaresque, ribald tales of Bahian city life, especially that of the racially conglomerate lower classes. Gabriela, cravo e canela (1958; Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon) and Dona Flor e seus dois maridos (1966; Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands; film, 1978) both preserve Amado's political attitude in their satire. His later works include Tenda dos milagres (1969; Tent of Miracles), Tiêta do agreste (1977; Tieta, the Goat Girl), Tocaia grande (1984; Show Down), and O sumiço da santa (1993; The War of the Saints). Amado published his memoirs, Navegaçãu de cabotagem (“Coastal Navigation”), in 1992.

Additional Reading

Fred P. Ellison, Brazil's New Novel: Four Northeastern Masters (1954; reprinted 1979); Bobby J. Chamberlain, Jorge Amado (1990).

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