Background
Euclides Rodrigues Pimenta da Cunha was born in the province of Rio de Janeiro on January 20, 1866. Orphaned at the age of 3, he was raised by aunts.
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engineer journalist sociologist writer
Euclides Rodrigues Pimenta da Cunha was born in the province of Rio de Janeiro on January 20, 1866. Orphaned at the age of 3, he was raised by aunts.
Euclides was interned in various boarding schools, and shuffled around a great deal. At 18 he enrolled in the military academy, where he specialized in military engineering. Two years later he apparently suffered a nervous breakdown that led to a court-martial and dismissal for insubordination, but he was reinstated. The incident may already have reflected an abhorrence for war.
In 1896 Euclides resigned from the army as a first lieutenant and subsequently took up civil engineering while writing occasional newspaper articles. When, in 1897, the army was forced to dispatch a fifth expedition into the backlands to crush a small messianic cult, Cunha accompanied the troops as a war correspondent for a leading Brazilian newspaper. Fighting in the searing heat of the drought-stricken region of northeast Brazil, the army proceeded to systematically exterminate the last of the sectarians, partially because they refused to surrender.
Cunha not only wrote the commissioned articles but gathered the material for his broadly conceived, great book. In the next 5 years he directed engineering works by day and wrote at night. The result was Os seroes (1902), translated as Rebellion in the Backlands. Because of its vivid portrayal of the agony and bitterness of warfare, its anticipation of the technique of the documentary novel, its philosophical insights, and its perceptive interpretation of Brazil, the book was an immediate success. In it Cunha probed Brazil's developmental problems and drew attention to the misery and ignorance that still characterize Brazil's interior.
Although Euclides was grudgingly persuaded by the then current "scientific" ideas on racial superiority, his social Darwinism was tempered with admiration for the mestizos, who had been so brutally treated by the allegedly more civilized representatives of the coastal cities. In some ways it was an antimilitary tract, certainly a denunciation of man's inhumanity. At the same time, the book portrayed flesh-and-blood men caught up in a drama that moved inevitably to a tragic conclusion. Cunha subsequently wrote several less important historical, biographical, geographical, and anthropological pieces, several of them dealing with the Amazon. A dispute over a woman led to his assassination at the age of 43 on August 15, 1909.
Euclides's most important work is Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands), a non-fictional account of the military expeditions promoted by the Brazilian government against the rebellious village of Canudos, known as the War of Canudos. This book was a favorite of Robert Lowell, who ranked it above Tolstoy. Jorge Luis Borges also commented on it in his short story "Three Versions of Judas".
Euclides was always moody, reserved, lonely and unpredictable.
In 1890 Euclides married Ana Emília Ribeiro. They had two children.
