SOURCE: A review of The Golden Harvest, in World Literature Today, Vol. 68, No. 1, Winter, 1994, p. 100.

In the following review, Stavans praises Amado's Golden Harvest.

Translated into English now for the first time, The Golden Harvest, in the realistic tradition of Europeans like Dickens and Balzac, is, simply put, a delight. Jorge Amado's first artistic period, ideologically committed, was concerned with class-struggle domination and the re-creation of social types from all segments of Brazilian society. Beginning with Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon in 1958, notwithstanding, he broke toward more magical, lighthearted constellations of themes and characters.

Originally published in 1944 as Sāo Jorge doe Ilhéus (this American edition was issued to coincide with the writer's eightieth birthday and his sixtieth year as a published writer, his first novel, The Land of Carnival, having appeared when he was only nineteen), The Golden Harvest indeed enlightens Amado's beginning as a novelist; it...