Manuel Antônio de Almeida
1831–1861
Biography
Manuel Antônio de Almeida (1831–1861) was a Brazilian satirical writer who also trained as a doctor and worked as a teacher. He was born in 1831 and died in 1861, at only thirty, and he is remembered chiefly for a single novel. That novel was published under the pen name Um Brasileiro, which means 'A Brazilian'.
The novel, Memórias de um Sargento de Milícias, is set in Rio de Janeiro in the years after the Portuguese court arrived there in 1808. It follows Leonardo, a lively young man, through the city's streets, past its police and militia, and through the small loves and scrapes of ordinary people. It first came out in instalments in a Rio newspaper in the early 1850s.
The narrator is light and ironic, and the book looks at everyday life from a playful distance rather than in the grand heroic manner of much fiction of its time. It is often counted among the first Brazilian novels to paint ordinary city life. Almeida is the patron of chair 28 of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. The book credited to him on this site is Memórias de um Sargento de Milícias.
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Books
Memórias de um Sargento de Milícias
by Manuel Antônio de Almeida
Leonardo, born in Rio de Janeiro in the days when King João VI held court there, is the son of a Portuguese emigrant and a girl he met on the ship out, whose courtship began with a pinch and a trodden foot. Manuel Antônio de Almeida's picaresque novel follows the scamp through…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.