Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839 – 1908) was a writer considered by many critics, scholars, writers, and readers to be the greatest name in Brazilian literature. Machado de Assis left a very extensive body of work, the result of half a century of literary labor, which includes plays, poetry, prologues, critiques, speeches, more than two hundred short stories, and several novels. "The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas" (1881) is a first-person narrative considered Machado de Assis's masterpiece. The novel, extremely daring for its time, is framed as the memoirs of a character, Brás Cubas, who writes after his death. The dedication at the beginning of the book already anticipates the humor and fine irony present throughout: "To the worm that first gnawed at the cold flesh of my corpse, I dedicate with fond remembrance these posthumous memoirs."
