Widely acclaimed as the progenitor of twentieth-century Latin American fiction, Machado de Assis (1839-1908)--the son of a mulatto father and a washerwoman, and the grandson of freed slaves--was hailed in his lifetime as Brazil's greatest writer. His prodigious output of novels, plays, and stories rivaled contemporaries like Chekhov, Flaubert, and Maupassant, but, shockingly, he was barely translated into English until 1963 and still lacks proper...