author
Aluísio Azevedo
1857–1913
A sharp-eyed Brazilian novelist, playwright, and caricaturist, he helped bring Naturalism into Brazilian literature. His fiction is known for vivid social observation and for confronting prejudice, class tension, and everyday life with unusual directness.
1 Audiobook
O Cortiço
by Aluísio Azevedo
About the author
Born in São Luís, Maranhão, in 1857, Aluísio Azevedo worked in several forms before becoming best known as a writer: he was also a caricaturist, journalist, playwright, and later a diplomat. His early writing showed Romantic influence, but he became a central figure in Brazilian Naturalism.
He is especially remembered for O Mulato (1881), widely regarded as a landmark in the rise of Naturalism in Brazil, and for O Cortiço (1890), one of his most enduring novels. His books often examine the pressures of race, environment, poverty, ambition, and social inequality, giving them a strong sense of place and a lively, sometimes unsettling realism.
Azevedo also had an important place in Brazil’s literary institutions: he was one of the founders of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. He died in 1913 in Argentina, leaving behind work that remains important for readers interested in how Brazilian fiction began to grapple more directly with society as it was.