his hand at almost every literary form: epic poetry, lyric poetry, drama, criticism, short stories, novels, journalistic commentary. But his fame now rests upon the three novels here mentioned, about thirty of his more than one hundred short stories, and two or three short poets, one of them an amazingly skillful translation of Poe’s Raven.
Most of Machado’s fiction prior to 1879 was in the popular romantic tradition. In that year his health, never robust, broke down so severely that he was forced to spend some months in a health resort. There he appears to have determined to free himself from literary conventions alien to his personality. The first fruit of this determination was the present novel, published in 1880. Dictated to his wife—some critics maintain that the process of dictation is manifest in the style—it represents a turn not only from romanticism to a sort of psychological realism but also from French influences to English. Machado had learned to read English and had become something of a literary Anglophile.
The book greatly enhanced Machado’s already secure reputation. Before long, critical opinion established him as Brazil’s leading man of letters. The Brazilian Academy of Letters unanimously elected Machado its president, a title that he held from the founding of the Academy in 1897 till his death in 1908.
In 1869 Machado married a white woman five years his senior, a cultured Portuguese who lived with him in what appears to have been complete harmony and devotion; she died in 1904. They had no children.
Through most of his life he worked as a public official—a bureaucrat, we should say—for it was almost impossible to earn a living as a writer. Epileptic, myopic, rickety, Machado had both the shyness and the intense need for companionship so often found in sickly persons. Among his friends one notes in particular the brilliant diplomat Joaquim Nabuco. Another friend—Ruy Barbosa, Brazil’s great liberal statesman—delivered Machado’s funeral oration. Symptomatic of the general unwillingness to grasp Machado's central
