The wife and partner of the famous Brazilian writer, Zélia Amado, describes the author's success on the streets of Portugal.
Letter from Zélia Amado to the couple Zora Seljan and Antonio Olinto (called "Zolintos").
One page, very delicate silk paper, with the letterhead of the Tivoli hotel, in Lisbon, where the Amado couple used to stay.
In Portuguese.
13.5 cm X 20 cm.
Portugal, undated.
Excellent condition of conservation.
Unique piece.
Extract
(...) Jorge is often singled out on the streets as the guy from the soap operas. This is because people think - Portugal watches Brazilian soap operas in large numbers - that Jorge is the author of all of them, and some think he is an actor: "Look at the guy who writes the soap operas!", "Look, the gentleman has a head!", "Isn't the gentleman by any chance Colonel Ramiro?" (...) They put their foot in it, they get everything mixed up (...).
A great admirer of Jorge Amado's work, Zélia Amado (1916 - 2008) began working with Jorge Amado in 1945 in the movement for amnesty for political prisoners. Shortly after, the two writers got married and Zélia decided to help her husband by reviewing and typing his original manuscripts. They lived in Rio de Janeiro, Paris and Czechoslovakia, where Zélia began the project of photographing Jorge, allowing a record of all the key events in the writer's life. Finally, they moved to Salvador, Bahia, his hometown.
Jorge Amado maintained an intense correspondence with Brazilian and foreign personalities throughout his life. There are more than 100,000 pages in the process of being catalogued by his foundation, documents that will unfortunately be made available to the public only after 2051, at the writer's own request. Jorge Amado obviously talked about literature, but also art and simple everyday facts with Brazilian and foreign intellectuals such as Pablo Neruda, Gabriel García Márquez, José Saramago, Juscelino Kubitschek and François Mitterrand, providing his Foundation with an invaluable source of research.
This document is interesting because it represents a direct testimony to Jorge Amado's international success, the importance of his work in Brazilian popular culture and the support of the wives (or husbands) - often unknown - of great artists, athletes, scientists, politicians, etc.
