Graciliano Ramos
Graciliano Ramos was a prominent Brazilian writer and a key figure in the literary movement of Brazil's Northeast during the 1930s and 1940s. Known for his leftist political views, Ramos aimed to portray the harsh realities of life in the sertão, a challenging region marked by environmental hardships such as droughts and floods. His literary works often focused on themes of social injustice and the struggles of impoverished characters, utilizing straightforward language to enhance the impact of his messages. Born in a small town and having experienced significant personal tragedies, including the loss of his first wife and family members to disease, Ramos's life experiences deeply influenced his writing. He began his literary career at an early age and later produced acclaimed novels such as "Vidas sêcas" and "São Bernardo," as well as nonfiction works, including his prison memoirs. Despite political challenges, including imprisonment due to his communist affiliations, Ramos continued to advocate for a return to authentically Brazilian literature. He passed away in 1953, leaving behind a legacy that highlights the socio-economic difficulties of Brazil's sertão region and a commitment to reflecting the lives of its inhabitants.
Graciliano Ramos
Brazilian novelist, essayist, memoirist, and children's author
- Born: October 27, 1892
- Birthplace: Quebrângulo, Alagoas, Brazil
- Died: March 20, 1953
- Place of death: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Biography
Graciliano Ramos (RAH-mohs) was a central figure in Brazil’s Northeast literary movement of 1930’s and 1940’s fiction. Through his writing, Ramos sought to depict accurately that region of Brazil collectively referred to as the Northeast. He and other “1930’s Generation” writers shared several characteristics: leftist political sympathies, expression of political beliefs in their novels, focus on social injustice, and sometimes simplistic composition and language, crafted to avoid interfering with the novel’s message. Ramos’s fiction has often been studied from a political or sociological perspective. Among Brazil’s Northeast writers, Ramos is said to have surpassed the others in technical skill.
Born in a small town in Brazil’s northeast corner, the eldest of numerous siblings, Ramos and his family knew at first hand the potential cruelty of the sertão. A less welcoming section of the Northeast than the more economically and culturally developed littoral (coastal) section, the sertão was a land of frequent disasters. Extended droughts frequently alternated with torrential rains to ravage the land, crops, and dreams of those living there. At age two, Ramos relocated to Pernambuco (Alagoas state) with his family in an ill-fated attempt at ranching, before severe drought drove them back to city life and general-store keeping only a few years later.
Ramos experienced early writing success in publishing sonnets in a Rio de Janeiro magazine at age thirteen. After working for several years in his father’s shop, he left for Rio de Janeiro, where he held several newspaper positions and began developing his fiction writing skills. The next year, 1915, Ramos returned home to Palmeira dos Índios after bubonic plague killed four family members. While there, he met and married Maria Augusta de Barros, with whom he later had four children. After five years of marriage, throughout which Ramos prospered as a shop owner, his wife died during childbirth. In 1925, eight years before its publication, Ramos began working on his first novel, painstakingly revising it for years. The next year, he was appointed president of the Palmeira dos Índios School Board and in 1927 was elected prefect (mayor) of the city. Marrying a second time in 1928, Ramos had four children with Heloísa Leite de Medeiros, though one son died in infancy.
The years 1929 and 1930 saw early signs of Ramos’s political difficulties. Following two reports he sent to the governor’s office, Ramos resigned as prefect and was appointed director of the state printing office, a position he held for only one year before resigning in 1931. In 1932, Ramos began work on his second novel and also opened his own school. After being appointed director of public instruction in Alagoas, he was fired three years later, upon his arrest and imprisonment on unspecified charges of being a communist. Released in 1936, Ramos settled his family in Rio de Janeiro and continued writing, completing two more novels and several nonfiction works, including his prison memoirs and childhood memoirs. During this time, he also held office as inspector of secondary education in Rio de Janeiro.
Ramos spent the next fifteen years attending literary conferences, writing, and translating. In 1945, he officially joined the Brazilian Communist Party, and in 1952 Ramos and Heloísa traveled to the Soviet Union and other European countries, though illness forced him to cut short their trip. Less than a year after his return to Rio de Janeiro, Ramos died of lung cancer in 1953. He spent his life encouraging a return to truly Brazilian literature, attentive to the plight of Brazil’s sertão region in all ways—socially, agriculturally, economically, and politically. His work often portrayed the destitute lives of his characters and their relation to the unforgiving settings in which they lived.
In the decades following Ramos's death, several volumes of his correspondence were put into print, as were previously unpublished works of juvenile literature, two novels within the collection Cangaços, and a collection of miscellaneous writings titled Garranchos.
Author Works
Long Fiction:
Caetés, 1933
São Bernardo, 1934 (English translation, 1975)
Angústia, 1936 (Anguish, 1946)
Vidas sêcas, 1938 (Barren Lives, 1965)
Nonfiction:
Infância, 1945 (Childhood, 1979)
Memórias do cárcere, 1953 (Jail Prison Memoirs, 1974)
Viagem, 1954
Linhas tortas, 1962
Cartas, 1981
Cartas a Heloísa, 1992
Cartas inéditas: De Graciliano Ramos a seus tradutores argentinos, Benjamín de Garay e Raúl Navarro, 2008 (Pedro Moacir Maia and Fernando da Rocha Peres, editors)
Relatórios de Graciliano Ramos publicados no Diário Oficial, 2013
Conversas, 2014
Short Fiction:
Dois dedos, 1945
Histórias incompletas, 1946
Insônia, 1947
Children's Literature:
A terra dos meninos pelados, 1939
Histórias de Alexandre, 1944
Alexandre e outros heróis, 1962
O estribo de prata, 1984
Minsk, 2013
Translation:
Memórias de um Negro, 1940 (of Booker T. Washington's memoir)
A Peste, 1950 (of Albert Camus's novel La peste)
Miscellaneous:
Obras completas, 1961 (10 volumes)
Viventes das Alagoas, 1962
Garranchos, 2012 (Thiago Mio Salla, editor)
Cangaços, 2014 (Thiago Mio Salla and Ieda Lebensztayn, editors)
Bibliography
Ellison, Fred P. Brazil’s New Novel: Four Northeastern Masters. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954. This book contains chapters on four individual novelists, plus a chapter discussing the Northeast novel’s importance within Brazilian literature.
Jackson, Holly. “Finding the Exit: Ideology and Aperture in Graciliano Ramos.” Ellipsis, vol. 13, Jan. 2015, pp. 121–44. Academic Search Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=113698814&site=eds-live. Accessed 9 June 2017. A critical analysis of Ramos's use of language in São Bernardo and Vidas sêcas.
Mazzara, Richard A. Graciliano Ramos. New York: Twayne, 1974. Following summaries of Ramos’s four novels are five additional chapters, each analyzing the author and his work from a different critical approach.
Monegal, Emir Rodríguez, ed. The Borzoi Anthology of Latin American Literature. Vol. 1. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. This source features a brief but interesting section on Ramos, including a translation of his short story “The Dog.”
Vincent, John S. “Graciliano Ramos: The Dialectics of Defeat.” In The Brazilian Novel, edited by Heitor Martins, Jon M. Tolman, et al. Bloomington: Indiana University Department of Spanish and Portuguese, 1976. This book explores Ramos’s position within Brazil’s Northeast genre, his treatment of social revolutionary thought in his work, and development of his novels’ characters.