Graciliano Ramos

Graciliano Ramos wrote Barren Lives, the novel of the Brazilian drought country, and Memories of Prison, about the year the Vargas regime held him without charge. He was born in Alagoas, worked as a shopkeeper and then as mayor of the small town of Palmeira dos Indios, where his annual reports to the state governor were so unusually written that they were noticed as literature. He became director of public instruction in the state. In 1936, during the repression that followed a communist rising, he was arrested without any charge ever being brought, held in Rio and then in the penal colony on Ilha Grande among common prisoners and political ones, and released after eleven months. Vidas Secas, published in 1938, follows a family of migrants and their dog across the sertao in a prose stripped to almost nothing, with chapters from the point of view of each of them including the dog, and it is the central text of the Brazilian northeastern novel. Memorias do Carcere was dictated in his last years and published after his death; he refused to make himself a hero in it. He joined the Communist Party in 1945, visited the Soviet Union, and wrote about that trip with a scepticism his comrades disliked. He died of lung cancer in 1953. Vidas Secas has been filmed and is on the Brazilian school curriculum. The prison memoir names the other prisoners, including Olga Benario, the German communist whom Vargas handed to the Gestapo while she was pregnant and who died in a gas chamber. He wrote that the worst thing about the cell was not the cruelty but the boredom.

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