Machado de AssisJoaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) is widely regarded as among the greatest Brazilian writers of all time. The grandson of freed slaves, he was born to a poor family in Rio de Janeiro and, with little formal education, took work as a typograper's apprentice and began to write and publish at age 15. Machado went on to a successful career as a government bureaucrat and writer of romantic fiction. From the late 1870s his style became more complex and ironic, and he went onto write the ground-breaking stories and novels that would permanently charge the course of Brazilian letters, among them Don Casmurro, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas and 'The Alienist'. Read More Read Less