Background
Dourado was born on January 18, 1926, in Patos de Minas, Minas Gerais, Brazil. He was the son of Telemaco Autran Dourado, a judge, and Alice Frietas Autran Dourado.
Dourado was born on January 18, 1926, in Patos de Minas, Minas Gerais, Brazil. He was the son of Telemaco Autran Dourado, a judge, and Alice Frietas Autran Dourado.
From an early age, Dourado was interested in literature. He attended primary school in the city of Monte Santo and the Gymnasium in São Sebastião do Paraíso. He attended the University of Minas Law School in Belo Horizonte. During his time there, he met many other young writers, including Fernando Sabino, Paulo Mendes Campos, Otto Lara Resende, and film critic Savato Magaldi.
At the beginning of his career, together with his friends, Dourado began publishing a literary magazine, Edificio (Building), which published his first major piece of writing, the novella Teia (Web). The publication of this book was financed by Dourado’s mother, as was his second book, Sombra e exilio (Shadow and Exile).
He moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1954, where he worked as serventuário justice. In 1955, he published "Nine Stories in Group Three," which received the Arthur Azevedo Prize of the National Book Institute. For five years he was Secretary of the Presidency of the Republic Press under President Juscelino Kubitschek.
Many critics consider Tempo de amar to be Dourado’s first important work. Like his previous two novels, it features an intellectual but unmotivated and unchallenged son, growing up in a small, repressive town. However, the author’s first book to achieve widespread popularity was A barco dos homens (The Ship of People, 1961), a novel that was chosen as the best book of the year by the Brazilian Union of Writers.
In Opera dos mortes (Voices of the Dead), Dourado introduces the Cota family, which appeared in several of his novels. Like Faulkner, he explores this family and their home and presents psychologically complex situations involving generations.
In 1976, Dourado published Urna poética de romance - Materia de carpintería, which is a discussion of his beliefs and methods about the construction of fiction.
Waldomiro Freitas Autran Dourado died in Rio de Janeiro, on 30 September 2012. He was buried in the cemetery St. John the Baptist.
(UNESCO collection of representative works)
1980The Autran Dourado literature is formed content often tragic, but where is this a poetic climate, and their characters are usually solitary creatures, primitive types, unsuitable figures to life around them.
Quotes from others about the person
"Dourado lists Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, and Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis as his literary forebears, and presents himself as both the heir of and speaker for the golden era of his native region, the eighteenth century, whose complexity and abundance he shares.” - M. Angelica Lopes
“Autran Dourado’s opus is marked by talent, discipline, and experimentation soundly based on literary research. His awards have acted as incentives; Dourado has chosen not to rest on his brilliance or his laurels, but has instead always sought newer paths as he continued to perfect ones he had already chosen.” - M. Angelica Lopes