Machado de Assis is the greatest name of Brazilian Literature, a genius of Fictional Realism. Between 1870 and 1900, he wrote novels, poems, chronicles, reviews and articles which fell into everyone Μs graces and influenced the 20th-century Brazilian writers. Born on the Livramento Μs Hill, in Rio de Janeiro, the son of a painter and a washerwoman, he acquired an extense literary culture, combining his bureaucratic career to his passion of prose. He produced masterpieces such as Dom Casmurro and MemΓ³rias PΓ³stumas de BrΓ‘s Cubas.