(A peasant family, driven by the drought, walks to exhaust...)
A peasant family, driven by the drought, walks to exhaustion through an arid land. As they shelter at a deserted ranch, the drought is broken and they linger, tending cattle for the absentee ranch owner, until the onset of another drought forces them to move on, homeless wanderers again.
Graciliano Ramos was a Brazilian regional novelist whose works explore the lives of characters shaped by the rural misery of northeastern Brazil. His books have been translated into several countries. His works "Vidas Secas", "São Bernardo" and "Memórias do Cárcere", were taken to the movies.
Background
Graciliano Ramos was born on October 27, 1892 in Quebrângulo, Alagoas, Brazil, nto the family of Sebastião Ramos de Oliveira and Maria Amélia Ramos, the oldest of the couple's 15 children. His father, a merchant who became a cattle rancher, was nearly ruined financially when a severe drought caused this venture to fail. In the following years, Ramos’s father worked at various occupations, necessitating several relocations for his growing family. Throughout his childhood, Ramos experienced firsthand the harsh realities of life in the sertao (“backlands”) of Brazil.
Education
Although Ramos attended both primary and secondary schools, he strongly disliked formal schooling and was largely self-educated. Ramos’s father introduced him to literature, and at an early age he began reading Brazilian and European novelists, among them Eca de Queiroz and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Career
When Graciliano Ramos was twenty-one, he moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he had a brief, unsuccessful career as a journalist and began writing short stories. In 1915 he moved to Palmeira dos Indios and opened a dry goods shop. During the next fifteen years he edited the town newspaper, wrote his first novel, Caetes, and was elected mayor.
Ramos’s mayoral report to the state government concerning social and political Problems in Palmeira dos Indios greatly impressed the Alagoas authorities with its honesty, nonbureaucratic style, and simple, precise Portuguese. This report was published in national newspapers and came to the attention of Augusto Frederico Schmidt, a prominent poet and publisher. Schmidt learned that Ramos was the author of an unpublished novel, and under his auspices Caetes appeared in 1933.
During the 1930s Ramos published three more novels — Sao Bernardo, Angustia (Anguish), and Vidas secas (Barren Lives) — and associated with a small group of northeastern Brazilian novelists. In addition, he held public-service positions, among them Director of Public Instruction in Alagoas. It was while serving in this capacity in 1936 that he was imprisoned during a political upheaval. The dictatorship in power regarded Ramos as a communist and his books as subversive. Upon his release from prison, he returned to Rio de Janeiro and in 1938 was appointed to another public service position.
In 1945, after being freed, he did not return to the Northeast, when he became one of the greatest Brazilian novelists, considered by many the successor of Machado de Assis. In the following years, he produced works in several genres, the most notable of which are his autobiography Childhood and his 1953 prison memoirs, Memorias do carcere. Serving as president of the Brazilian Writers Union, Ramos attended a literary congress in Moscow near the end of his life, and an unfinished essay about his trip, Viagem, was published posthumously. He died in Rio de Janeiro in 1953.
Graciliano described himself as an atheist, although he enjoyed reading the Bible.
Politics
In 1936, the writer was arrested for participation in the left movement. In 1945 he joined the Brazilian Communist Party.
Views
Graciliano Ramos was associated with the Generation of 1930, a group of Brazilian writers whose works focused on the social, economic, and political problems of the impoverished and culturally backward northeastern region of their country. At the same time there are features of Ramos’s work that distinguish him from this group. Ramos’s contemporaries were largely concerned with using fiction as a means for social change; their works are less devoted to artistic than political ends and are inherently optimistic with respect to the betterment of Brazilian society.
In contrast, Ramos’s works display a conspicuous artistry in their prose style and narrative structure, while their underlying philosophy is clearly one of pessimism regarding the human condition in general as represented by the grim destinies of his Brazilian protagonists. In addition, Ramos’s novels have a psychological depth unparalleled in the more sociologically oriented works of his contemporaries.
Quotations:
"Brazilian modernists, confusing the country's literary environment with the Academy, have drawn rigid (but arbitrary) dividing lines between good and bad. And, wishing to destroy all that was left behind, they condemned, by ignorance or shamelessness, much that deserved to be saved."
"Any romance is social. Even literature 'ivory tower' is social work, because only the fact of looking away from the other problems is social struggle."
Membership
Brazilian Writers Union
Personality
A generally unhappy childhood, marked by alienation from his parents and the hardships of the sertao, is considered the probable origin of the misanthropy and pessimism expressed in Ramos’s later writing.
Quotes from others about the person
Graciliano Ramos is notable among contemporary Brazilian writers for a severity of style, an accuracy of social and moral observation, and an intensity of tragic sensibility which derive as much from a scrupulous fidelity to native experience as from the stylists — Proust, Joyce, and more relevantly, Celine — whom his American publisher mentions as his models.” - Morton Dauwen Zabel, prominent critic and scholar.
Interests
Writers
Émile Zola, José Maria de Eça de Queirós, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Maxim Gorky
Connections
In Palmeira dos Índios, Alagoas, Graciliano Ramos married Maria Augusta Ramos, who gave him four children. The woman died shortly thereafter, in 1920. In 1936, he married Heloísa Leite de Medeiros, with whom he had four children: Ricardo, Roberto, Clara, and Luísa.