Graciliano Ramos

Ramos ran a dry-goods store and worked as a small-town journalist in Alagoas before politics pulled him further in; elected mayor of Palmeira dos Índios, he filed a famously laconic annual budget report that got him noticed by state officials and led to a post directing the state's education system.

In 1936, under Getúlio Vargas's dictatorship, he was arrested without charge or trial on suspicion of Communist sympathies and held for roughly ten months, part of it aboard a prison ship; he later turned the ordeal into Prison Memoirs, published after his death. He wrote Barren Lives, his best-known novel, largely in the years around that imprisonment.

He joined the Brazilian Communist Party after his release and continued writing and working as a public servant in Rio de Janeiro until his death in 1953.