Childhood

Ramos was one of many leftist intellectuals purged by President Getulio Vargas's government during the 1930s. Barren Lives (1938) examines the psychology of poverty during the drought in the interior of northeastern Brazil. The novel is narrated through the minds of several members of a family who, due to their lack of education and primitive show more natures, rarely communicate verbally. Of Ramos's technical accomplishments, Morton Zabel wrote in The Nation, "Graciliano Ramos is notable among the contemporary Brazilian writers for a severity of style, an accuracy of social and moral observation, and an intensity of tragic sensibility which derive as much from fidelity to native experience as from the stylists---Proust, Joyce and more relevantly, Celine---whom his American publisher mentions as models." (Bowker Author Biography) show less