Jorge Amado
Jorge Amado, (b. Aug. 10, 1912, Ferradas, near Ilhéus,
Braz.—d. Aug. 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.
