Abstract
If Vidas Secas is the Graciliano Ramos novel that most directly addresses the issue of poverty and its most striking consequences and as the author himself claims to be a kind of Fabiano in one of his letters, this article seeks to investigate the writer’s epistolary universe, in order to understand how this book, published in 1938, pervaded Graciliano’s life narrative at the precise moment in which he produced and attempted to distribute some of the chapters-tales that make up the novel. The readings of the author’s correspondence, especially the letters addressed to the Argentine translator Benjamin de Garay and his wife Heloísa, revealed not only a man with immense financial problems who was trying to survive as a writer, but also a writer who transformed scarcity into power, finding in words, as Fabiano, the strength necessary to go ahead and dream, like Baleia, of a different world.
Keywords:
Graciliano Ramos; Letters; Economic factor; Vidas Secas