Brazilian author Jorge Amado dead at 88

Jorge Amado

By staff and wire reports

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil -- Jorge Amado, Brazil's best-selling author, died Monday, family members said. He would have reached his 89th birthday Wednesday.

Amado, who had been ill for several years, died of heart and lung failure at 7:30 p.m. at the Alianca Hospital in the northeastern city of Salvador da Bahia.

Born in the state of Bahia, Amado has sold more books than any other Brazilian writer, with 44 novels, some of which have been translated into more than 40 languages.

One of them, "Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands," was made into a popular movie.

Amado was a perennial front-runner for the Nobel Prize and Brazil's best-selling author both at home and abroad, with 20 million volumes sold worldwide in nearly 50 languages.

Amado was born in 1912 in the small town of Itabuna and began writing at 15 as a cub reporter covering the Salvador morgue, moving in a crowd of what he recalls were Bohemian artists and poets and publishing his first work at 19.

In the early days, he wrote realist tirades like "Red Harvest" against injustice in the cocoa fields of Bahia's semi-arid outback, where so-called "colonels" ruled like medieval barons.

Briefly jailed for his socialist views during the 1930-1945 dictatorship of Getulio Vargas, the young Amado went into exile. But time had chipped away at some of the fundamentals of his life. Once a Communist congressman, he later described himself merely as a socialist.

Amado, living in exile in Paris in 1948-49, mixed with the likes of Pablo Picasso and Jean-Paul Sartre. His work was particularly popular in Communist-ruled countries at the time.

After four years traveling through Europe and Asia, he returned to Brazil and began a new phase of writing marked by a picaresque style with roguish figures as in "Gabriela," "Dona Flor," and "Tieta of the Wilds," which were easily translated to popular soap operas and movies.

Amado cast off the political militancy of his earlier work and took on a lighter tone, blending reality with fantasy and taking Bahia's sensuality, spiritualism and tropical colors as inspiration.

Some critics have denigrated Amado for stereotyping Brazilian society. His focus became Bahia's vibrant Afro-Brazilian culture and its food, music, small towns, cocoa plantations, beaches, politics, sexuality and violence.

Amado is survived by his wife, Zelia, also a writer, and two children.

Reuters contributed to this report.