The Brazilian novelist Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908), although only recently "discovered" outside Brazil, ranks among major world authors of the 19th century. His works are notable for their pessimistic view of human nature and their sophisticated psychological insights.

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis never left Rio de Janeiro, where he was born. His father was a mulatto house painter, and the future novelist received most of his "formal" education in the kitchen of a girls' school where his stepmother was a dishwasher. At 17 he became a typographer's apprentice and later a proofreader. For most of his life he supported himself--and later his cultured Portuguese wife, five years his senior--from his earnings as a middle-ranking bureaucrat. He was sickly from childhood, suffered from epilepsy, and lived in fear that he would suffer an attack in public. As a poor mulatto, he considered himself inferior even when lionized...