Jorge Amado

Amado grew up on his family's cacao plantation near Ilhéus, Bahia, the same boomtown world of planters, dockworkers, and street life that fills Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon and much of his later fiction. He joined Brazil's Communist Party as a young man and was later elected a federal deputy under it.

His politics brought repeated exile: his books were burned under the Vargas dictatorship, and he spent years abroad in France and Czechoslovakia after the party was banned, breaking formally with Communism only after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. He returned to Bahia to write with less overt politics and far greater popular warmth.

Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands followed, and he became Brazil's most internationally translated novelist, elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters and honored across Latin America before his death in Salvador in 2001.