Amado was born on Saturday, 10 August 1912, on a farm near the inland city of
Itabuna, in the south of the Brazilian state of
Bahia. He was the eldest of four sons of João Amado de Faria and D. Eulália Leal. The farm was located in the village of Ferradas, which, though today is a district of Itabuna, was at the time administered by the coastal city of
Ilhéus. For this reason, he considered himself a citizen of Ilhéus. From his exposure to the large
cocoa plantations of the area, Amado knew the misery and the struggles of the people working the land and living in almost enslaved conditions. This was to be a theme present in several of his works, for example,
The Violent Land of 1944. As a result of a smallpox epidemic, his family moved to Ilhéus when he was one year old, and he spent his childhood there. He attended high school in
Salvador, the capital of the state. By the age of 14 Amado had begun to collaborate with several magazines and took part in literary life, as one of the founders of the Modernist "Rebels' Academy". and of Brazilian actress and screenwriter
Véra Clouzot. Amado published his first novel,
The Country of Carnival, in 1931, aged 18. He married Matilde Garcia Rosa and had a daughter, Lila, in 1933. The same year he published his second novel,
Cacau, which increased his popularity. He studied law at the
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro Faculty of Law but never became a practising lawyer. His leftist activities made his life difficult under the dictatorial regime of
Getúlio Vargas. In 1935 he was arrested for the first time, and two years later his books were publicly burned. His works were banned from Portugal, but in the rest of Europe, he gained great popularity with the publication of
Jubiabá in France. The book received enthusiastic reviews, including that of
Nobel Prize winner French author
Albert Camus. In the early 1940s, Amado edited a literary supplement for the
Nazi-funded political newspaper "Meio-Dia". Being a communist militant, from 1941 to 1942 Amado was compelled to go into exile to
Argentina and
Uruguay. When he returned to Brazil he separated from Matilde Garcia Rosa. In 1945 he was elected to the National Constituent Assembly, as a representative of the
Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) (he received more votes than any other candidate in the state of
São Paulo). He signed a law granting freedom of religious faith. He remarried in 1945, to the writer
Zélia Gattai. In 1947 they had a son, João Jorge. The same year his party was declared illegal, and its members arrested and persecuted. Amado chose exile once again, this time in France, where he remained until he was expelled in 1950. His daughter from his first marriage, Lila, died in 1949. From 1950 to 1952 Amado and Gattai lived in
Czechoslovakia, where another daughter, Paloma, was born. He also travelled to the
Soviet Union, winning the
Stalin Peace Prize in 1951. Documents released to the public in 2016 show that in this period he was investigated by the CIA. On his return to Brazil in 1954, Amado abandoned active political life, leaving the Communist Party one year later. From that period on he dedicated himself solely to literature. His second creative phase began in 1958 with
Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, which was described by
Jean-Paul Sartre as "the best example of a folk novel". Amado abandoned, in part, the realism and the social themes of his early works, producing a series of novels focusing mainly on feminine characters, devoted to a kind of smiling celebration of the traditions and the beauties of Bahia. In addition to
Gabriela these novels included
Tereza Batista: Home from the Wars and
Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands. His depiction of the sexual customs of his land was scandalous to much of 1950s Brazilian society and for several years Amado could not even enter
Ilhéus, where
Gabriela was set, due to threats received for the alleged offence to the morality of the city's women. The Soviet Union kept publishing Amado's works shortly after their release in Portuguese. On 6 April 1961, he was elected to the
Brazilian Academy of Letters. On his death, his wife was elected to replace him. Amado made the Academy the setting for one of his novels,
Pen, Sword, Camisole. He received the title of Doctor
honoris causa from several universities in Brazil, Portugal, Italy,
Israel and France, as well as other honours in almost every South American country, including
Obá de Xangô (santoon) of the
Candomblé, the traditional Afro-Brazilian religion of Bahia. He was finally removed from the French Government blacklist in 1965 following the intervention of the then Minister of Culture,
André Malraux. In 1984 he was awarded the French
Légion d’Honneur by President
François Mitterrand. In 1987, the
House of Jorge Amado Foundation was created in Salvador. It promotes the protection of Amado's estate and the development of culture in
Bahia. The recently renovated building on the
Pelourinho in Salvador contains a small museum and wall panels with the covers of international editions of Amado's books.
Final years and death In his final years, Amado suffered from diabetes. On 5 August 2001, he was admitted to Hospital Aliança in Salvador (Bahia), where he died at the 19:30 BRT of the next day of heart and lung failure, four days before his 89th birthday. His ashes were spread in the garden of his house four days later.
Legacy On 4 December 2014, he received (posthumously) from the
Legislative Assembly of Bahia appointment as Commander of
Meritorious Citizen of the Freedom and Social Justice João Mangabeira (CBJM), the State's highest honour, due to his work in defence of social rights. On 20 October 2017, a newly-discovered species of
frog from
Bahia,
Phyllodytes amadoi, was named in his honor. The discoverers of this species noted that in addition to living in the same area as the species'
type locality, Amado was a lifelong frog enthusiast - over the course of his life, he had acquired a large collection of frog-themed
souvenirs from around the world, some of which remain on display at his home in
Salvador to this day. ==Selected works==