Third World literary fortunes

Where was Brazil in the so-called "Latin American" literary Boom? Third World Literary Fortunes posits a response contrasting the figures of Jorge Amado, "vulgar" but uniquely successful in capturing Brazilian popular energies in literature, and Joao Guimaraes Rosa, "Brazil's Joyce." This book introduces the reader to the life and work of five of Brazil's greatest writers, including (apart from Rosa and Amado): the country's other "greatest" writer, the extraordinarily subtle and psychologically acute Machado de Assis, a mulatto who, though a witness to slavery, completely effaced his own racial identity from his work; its best poet, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, one of the great twentieth-century portraitists of urban bourgeois mediocrity; and the seminal Renaissance man of Brazilian modernism, Mario de Andrade. The book examines their respective domestic and international receptions, discerning a clear pattern of international obscurity, with the exception of the black sheep, Jorge Amado - the only major Brazilian writer who celebrated negritude.