JOAQUIM MARIA MACHADO DE ASSIS was born in 1839. His paternal grandparents were mulattoes and freed slaves. His father, also a mulatto, was a painter and decorator, his mother a washerwoman, a white Portuguese immigrant from the Azores. His mother died of tuberculosis when Machado was only ten and he lived with his father and stepmother until he was seventeen, thereafter earning his own living, first as an apprentice typographer and proofreader, and, only two years later, as a writer and editor on the Correio Mercantil, an important newspaper of the day. By the time he was twenty-one, he was already a well-known figure in intellectual circles. During all this time he read voraciously in numerous languages, and between the ages of fifteen and thirty he wrote prolifically: poetry, plays, librettos, short stories, and newspaper columns. In 1867 he was decorated by the Emperor with the Order of the Rose, and subsequently appointed to a position in the Ministry of Agriculture, Commerce, and Public Works, where he served for over thirty years, until just three months before his death. Fortunately, this job left him ample time to write: nine novels, nine plays, over two hundred stories, five collections of poems, and more than six hundred crônicas, or newspaper columns. In 1897, he was unanimously elected the first president of the newly established Brazilian Academy of Letters. He was fortunate, too, in his marriage to Carolina Augusta Xavier de Novais, to whom he was married for thirty-five years. Following her death in 1904, at the age of seventy, Machado fell into a deep depression, and published only one more novel and a collection of stories dedicated to her. On his death in 1908, he was given a state funeral, and to this day is considered Brazil’s greatest writer.