GUIMARES, BERNARDO (JOAQUIM DA SILVA)

born Aug. 15, 1825, Ouro Prto, Braz. died March 10, 1884, Ouro Prto poet, dramatist, and regional novelist whose works marked a major transition toward greater realism in Brazilian literature and who was popular in his time as a minor Romantic novelist. After a youthful bohemian life in So Paulo, Guimares retired to his native Minas Gerais to write and teach school. Guimares' subject, like that of his contemporary Jos Martiniano de Alenar, was the Brazilian frontier, but he avoided Alenar's Romanticism. His antislavery novel A Escrava Isaura (1875; The Slave Girl Isaura), which helped to promote abolitionist sentiment in Brazil, is an early example of Latin-American social-protest literature and was compared to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852).