Érico Lopes Veríssimo was an important Brazilian writer, born in the State of Rio Grande do Sul.
Biography
Érico Veríssimo was the son of Sebastião Veríssimo da Fonseca and Abegahy Lopes Veríssimo. His father, heir of a rich family in Cruz Alta, met financial ruin during his son's youth and, as a result, Erico didn't complete secondary school because of the need to work. Veríssimo settled in Cruz Alta as the owner of a drugstore, but was unsuccessful. He then moved to Porto Alegre in 1930, willing to live solely by selling his writing. There he began to live around writers of renown, such as Mário Quintana, Augusto Meyer, Guilhermino César and others. In the following year, he was hired to occupy the position of secretary of edition of the Revista do Globo, of which he would become editor in 1933. He then undertook the whole editorial project at Editora Globo, propelling its nationwide fame. He published his first work, Fantoches, in 1932, with a sequence of short stories, mostly in the form of short plays. The following year, he saw his first great success with the romanceClarissa. Veríssimo married in 1931 to Mafalda Volpe and had two children, Luis Fernando Veríssimo, also a writer, and Clarissa. In 1943 he moved with his family to the United States, where he gave lessons on Brazilian Literature in the University of Berkeley, until 1945. Between 1953 and 1956 he was director of the Department of Cultural Affairs of the Organization of American States, in Washington, D.C.. This period of his life was recorded in some of his books, including: Gato Preto em Campo de Neve, A Volta do Gato Preto, and História da Literatura Brasileira, which contains some of his lectures at UCLA. His epic O Tempo e o Vento became one of the great masterpieces of the Brazilian novel, alongside Os Sertões by Euclides da Cunha, and by Guimarães Rosa. His historical trilogyO Tempo e o Vento is considered as his greatest work, written in the period of 1949-1961, from which arose primordial characters such as Ana Terra and Capitão Rodrigo that went on to become popular amongst his readers. Four of his, Time and the Wind, Night, Mexico, and His Excellency, the Ambassador, were translated into the English language by Linton Lomas Barrett. In 1965 Veríssimo published the romance O Senhor Embaixador, in which he reflected upon the deviations of Latin America. In the romance Incidente em Antares, written in 1971, he traces a parallel with Brazilian politics with the use of fantasy, with the rebellion of corpses during a strike of the gravekeepers, in the fictitious city of Antares. After suffering from a heart attack in 1975, Veríssimo was unable to complete the second volume of his autobiography entitled Solo de Clarineta, which was intended to be a trilogy, apart from a romance which would be entitled A Hora do Sétimo Anjo. He was the father of another famous writer of Rio Grande do Sul, Luis Fernando Veríssimo.
Works
His works have been compiled on three occasions:
Obras de Erico Verissimo – 1956
Obras completas – 1961
Ficção completa – 1966
Érico Veríssimo's books have been translated to German, Spanish, Finnish, French, Dutch, Hungarian, Indonesian, English, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Romanian, Russian and Czech. Short stories
