Coelho Netto
1864–1934
Biography
Henrique Maximiano Coelho Neto, known in print as Coelho Netto, was a Brazilian writer and politician. He was born in Caxias, in the state of Maranhão, to a Portuguese father and an Indigenous mother, and the family moved to Rio de Janeiro when he was a child. He studied law in São Paulo and Recife, but he gave up the degree and settled in Rio in 1885. In São Paulo he had already thrown himself into the campaigns for abolition and the republic, and once in Rio he turned to journalism.
In Rio he joined a circle of bohemian writers that included Olavo Bilac, and he wrote for newspapers and magazines, often under a range of pseudonyms. He became a prolific author of novels, short stories, plays and articles. Public life drew him into government and education: he taught art history and literature, directed the Drama School, and was elected a deputy for Maranhão in 1909 and again in 1917. He founded the second chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 1897, held it until his death in 1934, and presided over the Academy in 1926.
The site holds his novel A Capital Federal, whose title names Rio de Janeiro as the seat of the young republic. His fiction draws on the bohemian and political life of the city he knew at first hand, and this book lets readers judge that work for themselves.
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Books
A Capital Federal
by Coelho Netto
A countryman from the Brazilian backlands travels to the capital, Rio de Janeiro, and writes down his impressions. Coelho Netto's comic novel uses the outsider's eye on the city's new fashions, politics and noise in the years after the Republic.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.