Wilson Martins (literary critic): Difference between revisions

Brazilian literary critic and cultural historian

Wilson Martins (March 3, 1921 – January 30, 2010) was a Brazilian literary critic, cultural historian, and journalist. He is best known for the monumental series História da Inteligência Brasileira, a narrative account of Brazil’s intellectual and literary history.

He graduated from the Universidade Federal do Paraná and taught at New York University from 1965 to 1991. In 2002, the Academia Brasileira de Letras awarded him the Prêmio Machado de Assis for his body of work.

Born in São Paulo, Martins described his education as being marked by ”rigor, discipline, and obedience”. He read voraciously on a variety of subjects from a young age and began his career in journalism early on; at the age of 16, he was already working as copy editor for Gazeta do Povo, which hired him as a full-time writer in 1945.^[1][2] Around that time, he also worked as a radio presenter for Rádio RB2 (pt).^[3]

Martins graduated in 1943 with a degree in law from the Federal University of Paraná. Three years later, he debuted as a professional critic

Hr was a regular contributor for the Jornal do Brasil and O Estado de S.Paulo.^[4]

His major works include:

• O Modernismo (1965, 5ª ed. 1977) – tr. Jack Tomlins (1971), The modernist idea: a critical survey of Brazilian writing in the twentieth century, New York University Press, ISBN 0-8147-0293-7 reviewed at [1]
• História da Inteligência Brasileira – 7 volumes
• A Crítica Literária no Brasil – 2 volumes

• Sanches Neto, M. (1997). Wilson Martins. Editora UFPR. ISBN 85-7335-014-8 – in Portuguese
• (2001). Mestre da crítica: edição commemorativa dos 80 anos do crítico literario Wilson Martins, Professor Emérito da Universidade de Nova Iorque. Imprensa Oficial do Paraná. ISBN 85-7475-032-8 – in Portuguese