Over the last sixty years Jorge Amado has become the most widely published and translated of Brazilian writers. To date he has written more than thirty books, including fiction, poetry, biography, theater, memoirs, children's stories, and travel literature. Several of his works have been turned into motion pictures or telenovelas (television serial dramas). It is as a prose fictionist, however, that he has made his greatest contribution to literature. His twenty novels, many of them best-sellers, have been reprinted many times, and most have been translated into one or more of forty foreign languages. Blending social criticism with liberal doses of Afro-Brazilian and Luso-Brazilian folk culture, lyricism, humor, ribaldry, and politics, his fiction has evolved from an early proletarian or socialist-realist cast (from the 1930s to the early 1950s) to a later social-satirical modality (from the late 1950s to the present). In the process, Amado has gone from...