Page:Brazilian tales.djvu/24

20 of humor, as well as a lesson in criticism, in the author's anecdote (told in his foreword to the fourth edition) about the provincial editor who advised the youthful author to give up writing and hire himself out on a farm. This was all the notice he received from his native province, Maranhao. Yet Azevedo grew to be one of the few Brazilian authors who supported himself by his pen.

When Brazilian letters are better known in this nation, among Azevedo's work we should be quick to appreciate such a pithy book as the Livro de uma Sogra,—the Book of a Mother-in-Law. And when the literature of these United States is at last (if ever, indeed!) released from the childish, hypocritical, Puritanic inhibitions forced upon it by quasi official societies, we may even relish, from among Azevedo's long shelf of novels, such a sensuous product as Cortiço.

I have singled out, rather arbitrarily it must be admitted, a few of the characteristic works that preceded the appearance of Graça Aranha's Canaan, the novel that was lifted into prominence by Guglielmo Ferrero's fulsome praise of it as the "great American novel." For South America, no less than