RAMOS, GRACILIANO

born Oct. 27, 1892, Quebrngulo, Braz. died March 20, 1953, Rio de Janeiro Brazilian regional novelist whose works explore the lives of characters shaped by the rural misery of northeastern Brazil. Ramos spent most of his life in the backlands town of Palmeira dos ndios, where he was proprietor of a general store and mayor. His memoirs, Infncia (1945; Childhood), describe the hazards of his family's fortunes in the drought-stricken area, his meagre schooling, and the education he pieced together for himself by reading the works of mile Zola, Jos Maria de Ea de Queirs, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Maksim Gorky. In 1934 he published his best-known work, So Bernardo, the reflections of Paulo Honrio, who has risen by methods ranging from petty deceit to murder to become master of the plantation St. Bernard, where he was once a hired hand. In 1936 Ramos was arrested and imprisoned on a penal island. Though it was apparently because he was suspected of being a communist, no explanation for his arrest was ever given him. (He later joined the Communist Party in 1945.) On his release from prison he settled in Rio de Janeiro, where he earned a marginal income as a federal inspector of education. In 1938 he wrote Vidas Scas (Barren Lives), a story of a family's flight from drought to a mysterious land of promisethe city.