Machado de Assis

Machado de Assis was born in a Rio de Janeiro slum, the grandson of freed slaves, and largely educated himself while working as a typesetter's apprentice and journalist. Epileptic and increasingly deaf, he built a career inside the imperial bureaucracy as a civil servant while writing at night, marrying a Portuguese noblewoman whose family initially opposed the match.

His early novels were conventional romances; Dom Casmurro and The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, written after 1880, broke from them entirely, adopting unreliable narrators who address the reader directly and undercut their own stories, a technique closer to twentieth-century modernism than to anything in Brazilian letters before him.

In 1897 he founded and became the first president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, a position he held until his death in Rio in 1908.