Joaquim Manuel de Macedo - Life

Life

Joaquim Manuel de Macedo was born in the city of Itaboraí, in 1820, to Severino de Macedo Carvalho and Benigna Catarina da Conceição. He graduated in Medicine in 1844, and started to practice it in the inlands of Rio. In the same year, he published his romance A Moreninha. In 1849, he founded the magazine Guanabara, along with Manuel de Araújo Porto-alegre and Gonçalves Dias. In this magazine, many parts of his lengthy poem A Nebulosa were published.

Returning to Rio, he abandoned Medicine and became a teacher of History and Geography at the Colégio Pedro II. He was very linked to the Brazilian Imperial Family, even becoming a tutor for Princess Isabel's children. He was also a provincial deputy and a general deputy, and a member of the Brazilian Historic and Geographic Institute.

During his last years of life, he suffered mental disturbances. These made his health worse and led to his death on May 11, 1882.

He was married to Maria Catarina de Abreu Sodré, a cousin of poet Álvares de Azevedo. Some historians say that the titular character of his novel A Moreninha was based on her.

Read more about this topic:  Joaquim Manuel De Macedo

Famous quotes containing the word life:

    The fact which interests us most is the life of the naturalist. The purest science is still biographical.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have ... insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled.
    John Ruskin (1819–1900)

    Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life?—In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there?—Or is the use its life?
    Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)