Mário de Andrade
Mário de Andrade was a Brazilian poet, novelist and photographer.
Mário Raul de Morais Andrade was a Brazilian poet, novelist, musicologist, and cultural administrator who stands as the central figure of the country's Modernist movement. Born on 9 October 1893 in São Paulo, he died there on 25 February 1945 of a heart attack at the age of 51.
Trained as a pianist at the São Paulo Conservatory of Drama and Music, he turned to literature after a hand injury and helped organise the Modern Art Week of February 1922 at the Municipal Theatre of São Paulo, the founding event of Brazilian Modernism. His 1922 collection of poems Paulicéia Desvairada introduced free verse and a self-consciously Brazilian Portuguese to serious literature.
His 1928 novel Macunaíma, subtitled "the hero with no character", remains his most celebrated work. Drawing on indigenous mythology, Afro-Brazilian folklore, and the rhythms of urban Portuguese, it follows a shape-shifting protagonist across a fantastical Brazil and helped define the country's modern literary self-image.
From 1935 to 1938 he directed the São Paulo Department of Culture, where he created public libraries, the city's first municipal park playgrounds, and the Folklore Research Mission of 1938, which recorded popular music across the Brazilian Northeast. His ethnomusicological essays and his correspondence with Manuel Bandeira and other Modernists shaped a generation of Brazilian artists.
The name Mário is the Portuguese form of Mario, derived from the Roman family name Marius, of uncertain origin but often connected to Mars, the god of war, or to the Latin mas meaning "male". He carried the name through every Modernist battlefield he chose to fight on.