“I was born on the 18th April, 1883, in Taubate, State of São Paulo, the son of parents who owned a coffee estate. I initiated my studies in that city and proceeded later to São Paulo, where I entered the department of Law, being graduated, like everybody else, as a Bachelor of Laws. Fond of literature, I read a great deal in my youth; my favourite authors were Kipling, Maupassant, Tolstoi, Dostoievsky, Balzac, Wells, Dickens, Camillo Castello Branco, Eça de Queiroz and Machado de Assis … but I never let myself be dominated by any one. I like to see with my own eyes, smell with my own nose. All my work reveals this personal impression, almost always cruel, for, in my opinion, we are the remnant of a race approaching elimination. Brazil will be something in the future, but the man of today, the Luso-Africano-Indio will pass out of existence, absorbed and eliminated by other, stronger races … just as the primitive aborigine passed. Even as the Portuguese caused the disappearance of the Indian, so will the new races cause the disappearance of the hybrid Portuguese, whose rôle in Brazilian civilization is already fulfilled, having consisted of the vast labour of clearing the land by the destruction of the forests. The language will remain, gradually more and more modified by the influence of the new milieu, so different from the Lusitanian milieu. “Brazil is an ailing country.” (In his pamphlet _Problema Vital_, Lobato studies this problem, indicating that man will be victorious over the tropical zone through the new arms of hygiene. The pamphlet caused a turmoil throughout Brazil, and sides were at once formed, the one considering Lobato a defamer of the nation, the other seeing in it an act of sanative patriotism. As a result, a national program of sanitation was inaugurated. This realism of approach, so characteristic of Lobato, made of his figure Jéca Tatú a national symbol that has in many minds replaced the idealized image of _Pery_, from Alencar’s _Guarany_. _Jéca_ thus stands for the most recent critical reaction against national romanticism.) “I recognize now that I was cruel, but it was the only way of stirring opinion in that huge whale of most rudimentary nervous system which is my poor Brazil. I am not properly a literary man. I take no pleasure in writing, nor do I attach the slightest importance to what is called literary glory and similar follies. I am a particle of extremely sensitive conscience that adopted the literary form,--fiction, the conte, satire,--as the only means of being heard and heeded. I achieved my aim and today I devote myself to the publishing business, where I find a solid means of sustaining the great idea that in order to cure an ailing person he must first be convinced that he is, in fact, a sick man.”