COELHO NETTO (1864-1934): A LIFE DEDICATED TO LITERATURE

Abstract

　

Although the Brazilian writer Henrique Maximiniano Coelho Netto isn’t very well know by the public nowadays, he was a very important name in the national literary and social fields from the end of the monarchy until at least 1930. He was one of the few writers of his time that could manage to live exclusively from his writing – although writers such as Raul Pompéia and Aluísio Azevedo tried, they were never able to earn their livings by this mean – because he was very admired by the public, and so he could publish more than a hundred books, and also wrote literature in the most respectable newspapers of the southeastern part of the country for nearly fifty years. A lengthy reading of his work allow us discover the great importance he put on the education of the people. We see it in critic way he speaks of slavery and monarchy, that kept our country far from the ―progress‖ he saw in Europe; in the importance he sees in literature, that is responsible to make the language of a country ―eternal‖; and in the reservations he makes to movies, because he believed they could corrupt people’s behaviors. Therefore, a reading in the author’s writing is fundamental to the ones who want to think about the production of literature in the last decades of the nineteenth century and in the first three decades of the twentieth.