Letter from Zélia Amado about Jorge Amado

> This item is no longer in the catalogue, see the available documents here <

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 tissue paper, with a letterhead from the Tivoli hotel, in Lisbon, where the Amado couple used to stay.
• In Portuguese.
• 13.5 cm X 20 cm.
• Portugal, undated.
• Excellent condition.
• Unique piece.

Extract

(...) Jorge is pointed out - often stopped - on the streets like the guy in soap operas. This is because people think - Portugal in large numbers watches Brazilian soap operas - that Jorge is the author of all of them and, some, that he is an actor: "Look at the guy who writes the soap operas!", "Look, the gentleman has a head!" , "isn't the gentleman by chance Colonel Ramiro?" (...) They put their feet in their hands, they confuse everything (...).

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 afterwards, the two writers got married and Zélia decided to help her husband by proofreading and typing his original manuscripts on the typewriter. 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, their homeland.

Jorge Amado maintained an intense correspondence with Brazilian and foreign personalities throughout his life. There are more than 100 thousand pages in the cataloging process at its foundation, documents that will unfortunately - by the writer's own will - be made available to the public only from 2051 onwards. Jorge Amado obviously talked about literature, but also art or simple everyday facts , with Brazilian or foreign intellectuals such as Pablo Neruda, Gabriel García Márquez, José Saramago, Juscelino Kubitschek or François Mitterrand, offering your Foundation an invaluable source of research.

This document is interesting because it represents a direct witness 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, sportsmen, scientists, politicians, etc. .