The Formation of an Intellectual and Academic Community in São Paulo and the Emergence of a Collegiate Intelligentsia

The outbreak of the São Paulo modernist movement was intrinsically linked to the patronage of a wealthy and cultured segment of the industrial and cultural bourgeoisie.⁸ At the same time, political differentiation created diverging wings within the ruling elite, anchored in competing political parties or newspapers like O Estado de S. Paulo, which belonged to the Mesquita family.⁹ Such changes in the composition of the elites reflected the economic prosperity of São Paulo and the clear ambitions of the state’s leaders to dominate national politics. The effervescence of cultural production in São Paulo thus occurred within a context of social and political crises made worse by successive strikes and internal struggles for control of the state’s only oligarchic political party (Partido Republicano Paulista/PRP) and the creation of an ersatz “opposition” movement (Partido Democrático/1926).¹⁰

The relative political strength of the Mesquita family stemmed from their bold cultural entrepreneurship (Limongi, 1989b). In addition to O Estado de S. Paulo, the Mesquitas owned an evening newspaper (Estadinho 1915) and financed the prestigious “high culture monthly” magazine Revista do Brasil (1916), São Paulo’s main intellectual and cultural mark on the Brazilian scene. The cohort of writers forming the modernist vanguard operated within these deep transformations taking place in the political and cultural institutions of the São Paulo oligarchy, having to constantly negotiate and respond to disputes between members of the state’s ruling elite. The collapse of one-party rule and the emergence of a powerful segment of cultural entrepreneurs opened unexpected and exciting job offers to young people with literary pretension.

Such changes loosened social ties within the homogenous class to which most aspiring intellectuals belonged. Going forward, opportunities would be more accessible to those who could not boast the compulsory itinerary of the well-to-do: moving from the law school and its academic associations to the exclusive clubs of the elite, from where they were elevated to positions in prestigious law firms, leading newspapers, or powerful political factions.

Writers from the first generation of modernists, all of whom were trained lawyers except for Mário de Andrade, felt drawn by service to politicians—in cabinets, public administration, or in congress—the demands of the press, new initiatives in the publishing industry, and the development of a literary body of work. Those tied to the hegemonic PRP—Oswald de Andrade, Cassiano Ricardo, Plínio Salgado, Menotti del Picchia¹¹—as well as those linked to dissident political causes or the democratic “opposition”—Mário de Andrade, Sergio Milliet, Paulo Duarte—labored jointly in the aforementioned fields.¹² Most had to subject themselves to some form of petty political service, either as aides, partisan journalists, or high-level employees, as the price to be paid in order to continue their coveted intellectual pursuits.

The victory of dissenting oligarchies from Rio Grande do Sul and Minas Gerais in 1930,¹³ supported by upstart junior army officers known as tenentes and other intermediate segments of the armed forces opposed to São Paulo’s political hegemony, drastically altered the landscape of opportunities for aspiring intellectuals. Soon thereafter, a sizable portion of this generation inflated by law school graduates, many of whom studied at exclusive colleges created in the wake of privatizing education reforms in 1891 and 1911, lost their jobs in politics. For many, the new status quo disrupted the traditional career path linking professional success with loyalty to the ruling elites of one’s home state.¹⁴

This rising generation of intellectuals’ insertion into mainstream politics was also affected by attractive new radical political and ideological movements of the left and right springing up around the country. With charismatic leaders and clear guiding principles, these groups based themselves on authoritarian and “salvationist” models.¹⁵ The Brazilian Communist Party (PCB/1922), the traditionalist Catholic magazine A Ordem (1922), the lay Catholic intellectual group Centro Dom Vital (1922) which sought the “rearmament” of the church’s institutional hierarchy, and the fascist Ação Integralista Brasileira (AIB/1932) absorbed intellectuals and political actors orphaned by the Old Republic.¹⁶ A considerable segment of young men seeking intellectual and political careers were drawn from “deposed” oligarchic constituencies. If not for the defeat of São Paulo’s hegemonic aspirations, undermining the ascension of politicians making a name for themselves at the state level, rising figures like Plínio Salgado of the AIB and Cândido Motta Filho would not have embraced anti-liberal ideologies that sought to “redeem” and restore the bourgeois order.

It is well established that the victory of federal troops over forces from São Paulo in October 1932 was the deciding factor in the organization of the Integralist movement.¹⁷ This defeat marked the second time the state’s elite was forcefully rebuffed, after which they still had to endure local authority imposed by the provisional government of Getúlio Vargas in the form of an interventor. The São Paulo coalition had to accept such snubs despite prevailing in the elections of 1933 and 1934, closing ranks under the leadership of Armando de Sales Oliveira, the son-in-law of the old Mesquita patriarch.¹⁸ The political cost of this humiliation, compounded by the moralistic legalism brandished in the 1934 campaign that followed the 1932 spasm of insurrection, was overcome by the creation of the authoritarian Estado Novo regime in 1937.¹⁹ None of this, of course, prevented the central government from complying with São Paulo’s demands for economic policies that would benefit coffee-growing and industrial interests.²⁰ Many of the young intellectuals who joined radical right-wing organizations in the 1930s were former law students disappointed with national politics, lacking institutional support, and with no prospects for professional development.

The defeat of the Paulista oligarchy—that is, from the state of São Paulo—produced efforts to create new institutions that would address the dearth of staff specializing in political and cultural work. Although the execution of that goal proceeded in unexpected ways, the investments contributed decisively to local cultural production that would dominate national discourse, a result already evident by the 1940s. In the long run, this cultural entrepreneurship helped make possible São Paulo’s gradual and bumpy return to national political preeminence. Most important was the creation of the Escola de Sociologia e Política (ESP/1933) (Limongi, 1989a), the Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras (1934) at the heart of the renovated Universidade de São Paulo (USP), and the Departamento Municipal de Cultura.²¹ Partnering with highly-qualified foreign scholars—Americans at ESP and Europeans at USP—hired for extended periods, these institutions of higher education introduced disciplines that did not yet exist in Brazil in the humanities (sociology, anthropology, philosophy) and the hard sciences (physics, chemistry, natural history, and mathematics), creating a scholarly community in line with American and European standards.²² This includes professors and researchers working full-time at the university and making that institution the center of their personal, affective and professional lives; the space for their professional development and socialization; the focus of aspirations for upward mobility; and the main arena for academic validation. São Paulo was indeed the only place in Brazil in which a scholarly intelligentsia took shape and produced a legitimate intellectual elite, although its output—theses, articles, books—would only be fully realized twenty years later between 1953 and 1964.²³

Along with the innovative vigor of the first graduating classes of social scientists, rapid urban and industrial development in São Paulo state also impacted the recruitment and reproduction of the intellectual community independently of conservative elite values.²⁴ In particular, the high participation of women and children of immigrants—mostly Italian and Jewish—when compared to the negligible presence of these groups in the traditional colleges of law and medicine helped shape the agenda of these rising academics. Despite the endorsement of the conservative Mesquita family and the São Paulo intellectual vanguard, USP gradually shed the bonds of such patronage and established its own framework of operation and authority. Meeting the demands for higher education from the emerging social classes collided with the local elites’ “enlightenment project,” providing professionalization for the middle segments of society on an upward trajectory.²⁵

The Publishing Boom and the Emergence of Professional Novelists

Accelerated rates of industrialization and urbanization provided the infrastructure for cultural production—universities, museums, magazines, professional associations of writers and scientists, theater companies, publishing houses, a film industry—whose main drivers were the young university graduates who studied under prominent foreign scholars.²⁶ Despite boasting large publishing houses and a prestigious literary journal, São Paulo mostly disregarded the novel as a form of describing and interpreting the social changes taking place in Brazil. Intellectuals favored social science texts and artistic productions by playwrights like Jorge Andrade who dramatized the confrontation between the decadent coffee-growing elite and the improving fortunes of immigrants.²⁷

In the 1930s, the development of a market for books, based primarily on domestic and international fiction, helped shift patterns of cultural dependency and made possible the emergence of a group of authors whose careers depended on sales of their novels. The main publishing houses invested heavily in various forms of literary fiction such that locally produced books soon became competitive with translations of foreign works.

Most of the emerging novelists came from states far removed from the São Paulo-Rio de Janeiro axis that dominated the nation’s intellectual production: José Lins do Rego (Pernambuco), Rachel de Queiroz (Ceará), Érico Veríssimo (Rio Grande do Sul), Lúcio Cardoso and Ciro dos Anjos (Minas Gerais), Jorge Amado (Bahia), and Graciliano Ramos (Alagoas). They were, for the most part, self-taught and lacking the means and technical resources to excel in the genres favored by the traditional oligarchic elites like poetry, essays, and literary criticism. Influenced by cinema, comics, pulp fiction, and detective stories, these rising novelists also took cues from innovative narrative forms gaining renown on the international stage—Americans like John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, and Ernest Hemingway; Russians like Dostoevsky, Gorki, and Tolstoy—as the focus of cultural dependency on the global periphery shifted from Europe to the United States.

Amid intense ideological competition between Catholic intellectuals, integralists, and communists, the novel became an aesthetic and programmatic alternative to the modernist orthodoxy that by then was in decline. It also presented a medium for more realistic interpretations of the transformations rocking Brazilian society in line with the demands of a growing audience. As was the case with many of the Anatolian writers of the Old Republic, the modernist vanguard²⁸ and intellectuals affiliated with radical movements, these novelists were almost all drawn from families grappling with economic decline, preventing them from inheriting the social status and material wealth of their parents. This sense of “degradation” was central to the lives and careers of this group of provincial authors. There was, however, at least one advantage to be drawn from these circumstances: the subject matter necessary to write social and introspective novels, as literary criticism would later refer to these works. Assessments of their own backgrounds and experiences combined with increasing awareness of the plight of subaltern groups to produce literary reflections of power dynamics and class in Brazilian society. Growing up, many novelists and their families frequently changed residences, cities, states, and regions, producing a sense of instability compounded by their parents’ occupational turnover. This experience would later allow these writers to comment on the harm of familial “displacement” and to weaken lingering class loyalties.

This material “downgrading” forced members of a fading elite to confront alternative social realities, exposing them to destitute members of the middle class, impoverished rural workers, and urban industrial laborers. Undergoing experiences foreign to their elite upbringing and expressing what they witnessed through fiction, these authors captured the collapse of a social universe they had observed firsthand. They depicted characters molded by poverty and humiliation, powerless, like the novelists themselves, in the face of bleak prospects.²⁹

These authors and other fallen intellectuals from the traditional oligarchy sought to reframe their expectations and investments given the impossibility of inheriting wealth that no longer existed. The only currency available to them was the network of family connections that could be strategically activated to ensure a quality education, to safely select an advanced course of study, to secure good marriages to the best remaining prospects, and to attain safe public jobs through patronage and nepotism, all of which were strategies to protect “poor relatives” of the oligarchy from further decline. In order to capitalize on these traditional benefits, families in decline had to remain outwardly loyal to those in power. Thus, a father might work as a crony, canvasser, bureaucrat, or scribe for politicians or political parties while a mother might sew, knit, embroider, produce lace and layettes, bake and cook for weddings and other family ceremonies. These activities allowed the “poor relatives” of the oligarchy to mitigate the effects of impoverishment while ensuring continued employment opportunities for their children, who otherwise faced exclusion from the most coveted administrative, political, and cultural positions.

Intellectuals and the State

The political battles that inspired the political engagement of the generation of 1870—over slavery and other underlying tensions that culminated in the birth of the republic—centered on different issues than those identified by luminaries of the First Republic (such as Rui Barbosa and Olavo Bilac). This activism was spurred primarily through nationalist organizations and the mobilizations of university students. But while the Anatolians eagerly entertained entreaties from the press and oligarchic leaders for compliant editorials, articles, and short stories, intellectuals recruited by the Vargas regime (1930–1945) were offered myriad new political and ideological positions created by increased state intervention in every sector of public life.³⁰ This explains the mass scale on which intellectuals were co-opted into government service.

The Vargas regime transformed the relationship between intellectuals and the federal government primarily by establishing cultural production as part of the “official business” of the state. The new regime offered resources while reserving the right to intervene forcefully in the production, dissemination, and preservation of intellectual and artistic work.³¹ Notwithstanding the expansion of the publishing industry and the growth of civil service jobs, access to intellectual professions largely still depended on the ability of families to transmit to their children a measure of social and cultural capital and a degree of proximity to the ruling class. Intellectuals were co-opted by the government as part-time workers, consultants, trusted advisors in offices of the federal bureaucracy, heads of government agencies, and mid-level workers filling vacancies within the vastly expanding apparatus of the state.³² The regime’s intellectual and bureaucratic elite consisted of a select group of luminaries occupying cabinet positions within the executive branch. This small number of men wielded decisive power on policy matters within their purview. Indeed, many held more than one formal position or post, earning them the status of mandarins of the state.³³ Some of them subsumed all of their writing to political commitments and professional demands, while others sought to protect part of their intellectual production from official interference and factionalism within the government. The intellectual weight of these leading figures—Francisco Campos, José Américo de Almeida, Oliveira Viana, Pontes de Miranda, and Alceu Amoroso Lima, to name a few—assured them safe and unimpeded passage through the halls of power.

Intellectuals invited to serve as aides and advisors to those major figures in cabinet positions were known as “trusted men.” These positions also came with their own perks, like a staff, private secretaries, aides, and other advisors. Appointment to these secondary but essential positions depended almost entirely on ties of friendship and loyalty, ensuring that those who held such posts were both guarantors and beneficiaries of the new order. This group included prototypical civil servant-writers like Peregrino Jr., Gilson Amado, Heitor Moniz, and Luiz Vergara, as well as some more prominent figures held in high regard by the cultural intelligentsia including Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Augusto Meyer, and Rodrigo Melo Franco de Andrade. The former operated in lesser genres, like biographies of illustrious men and short intellectual histories; the latter were celebrated by critics and various elite panels of writers. The second group sought to minimize the extent to which their works depended on the clientelistic ties they enjoyed, committed as they were to fostering the impression that their writing owed little to the established order.³⁴

A smaller contingent of scholars, people like Ciro dos Anjos, Prudente de Morais Neto, and Manoelito de Ornellas occupied important positions in federal agencies at the state level. Others headed essential institutions of cultural production and preservation, such as Rodolpho Garcia (Museu Histórico Nacional), Roquette-Pinto (Instituto Nacional de Cinema Educativo), Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, and Rubens Borba Alves de Morais (Biblioteca Nacional).

The intellectuals closest to the regime’s ideological formulation either occupied positions of considerable authority (Lourival Fontes) or they worked in state entities of cultural production and diffusion or the regime’s propaganda and censorship agencies as censors, writers, and overseers of the cultural and ideological repressive apparatus. This included figures like Genolino Amado, Helio Viana, and José Condé, among others. Still, most of the intellectuals working within the state entered the ranks of the bureaucracy through traditional channels: the superior magistrate, careers in the judiciary, and the diplomatic corps. In virtually every case, material and institutional dependency reaffirmed the clientelistic relationships between intellectuals and the state. Subsidies from the latter sustained the offices of the former, insulating intellectuals from the vicissitudes of the private sector and other professional fluctuations. Many intellectuals thus continued producing works in exchange for employment within the state, remaining mostly silent as to the potential conflicts of interest involved in such transactions. Eager to preserve their dual roles as scholars and employees of the state, these men sought to minimize the extent to which they benefited from political cronyism by appealing to a broader nationalist discourse of cultural, political, and economic development. Maintaining the somewhat fanciful ideological posture inaugurated by the modernists, intellectuals co-opted by the Vargas regime saw themselves as emissaries of society as a whole, blessed by organic links to the nation’s cultural base and the natural defenders of artistic production. The Vargas regime’s conservation policy for historical and artistic heritage was the new government’s clearest attempt at manufacturing a distinctive national identity in the dependent tropical country.

In the growing field of state-sanctioned cultural production, the government quickly established itself as the principal arbitrator of legitimacy. Recognition from the state—through commissions, awards, cultural trips abroad, official perks—became the ultimate goal of those who aspired to join the pantheon of “Brazilian culture,” an ideal that inspired the production, distribution, and consecration of symbolic goods at government expense.

Federal influence extended even into areas that did not fall under the purview of the state such as the elections of the Brazilian Academy of Letters³⁵ and publication deals with the prestigious Editora José Olympio.³⁶ As the Minister of Education and Public Health beginning in 1934, Gustavo Capanema established the paradigm of government sanction for official cultural production by a small number of hand-selected intellectuals.³⁷ He also brought into government members of his cohort in Minas Gerais who had participated in the modernist movement in that state,³⁸ and he mobilized noted figures who had participated in movements of literary and artistic renewal in the 1920s from Rio Grande do Sul, Bahia, Pará, and São Paulo, while taking in representatives of the Catholic Church designated through the informal recruitment of lay leader Alceu Amoroso Lima, and surrounding himself with a select group of poets, architects, artists, and a few doctors enthralled by literary production.³⁹

State co-optation of intellectuals during the Vargas era reached members of diverse movements and political forces active during the 1920s and 1930s: leftists, integralists, conservative Catholics, holdovers from the old oligarchic order, and specialists in emerging academic fields. No single ideological group or partisan faction entirely succeeded in converting their priorities into doctrinal orthodoxy within the regime, but most of the gains in positions of influence favored the integralist movement and conservative representatives of the church. Members of the Catholic hierarchy placed representatives in areas of negotiation—especially the ministries of labor and education—in order to preserve or expand their influence over disputes affecting investments related to the church,⁴⁰ most significantly in schools and arenas of cultural production.

The power dynamics between those in economic decline and the patrons on whom they depended also permeated transactions between those with political power and intellectuals in the process of being incorporated into the apparatus of the regime. The former “bought” not only services but also the networks through which other intellectuals could be influenced by government directives. The experience of this generation of co-opted thinkers, authors, and innovators reveals the link between, on one hand, class considerations fueling the intellectual careers of many and, on the other, the political and ideological demands on young professionals wary of losing their connection to the ruling elite. The social fate of intellectuals resembles the trajectory of those cohorts entering the clergy, the military, and electoral politics. The insertion of political and intellectual personnel into the heart of the elite allows us to discern the peculiarities of a system of domination based on the growing rift between those holding economic power and newer groups increasingly taking the reins of political command (military men, magistrates, professional politicians, and public intellectuals).

In sum, faced with constrained intellectual autonomy due to the prerogatives of ruling elites, many writers—with the partial exception of novelists—found their works shaped by the coercive pressures that their political positions entailed. Significant figures of the Paulista oligarchy, those who joined radical movements, and even the heterogeneous contingent that converted service to the regime into the production of academic “chimeras,” embraced strategies of compliance with the established order so as not to risk derailing their intellectual ambitions. Nevertheless, as a result of expansion and differentiation within the field of cultural production, the methods of accommodation and survival available to these writers broadened the scope of professional activity to include the university, the publishing industry, and the establishment of an authorial body of work.

Discussion of the Literature

A survey of studies on Brazilian intellectuals reveals recurring interpretations, which stress either the morphology of the intellectual field plus the intellectuals’ position within the ruling class, or the oversized political contributions of intellectuals. Most have focused on the ideological inclinations of prominent thinkers within the ruling elite, sometimes emphasizing benefits derived from their relationship with the state while overstating such privileges in other instances. Outside of a number of monographs that do not present broad explanatory schemas, we can identify the major lines of argumentation that have influenced subsequent work: (a) the historical-sociological argument that I advanced most cohesively in my 1979 doctoral dissertation; (b) the political argument presented by French sociologist and Latin-Americanist Daniel Pécaut; (c) the organizational and institutionalist argument developed by Brazilian political scientist Simon Schwartzman.

Critical response to my dissertation focused on the link I established between class and the insertion of these orphans of the oligarchy into intellectual careers. I hoped to situate the constraints stemming from declining social status within broader changes taking place in the field of academic production, all of which were shaped by the shifting political and institutional context of the day. These intellectuals’ careers were molded not only by the declining fortunes of their class, but also by handicaps such as physical and social stigmas to which might be added constraints concerning their position within the familial lineage or within sibling groups, in order to grasp their status as the “poor relatives” of the traditional oligarchy. Enduring educational and cultural capital gave these families access to those professions usually acquired by virtue of social connections. Analyzing intellectuals by their social origins and their position within the ruling elite served to question the traditional classifications and conclusions drawn by historians and literary critics.

Daniel Pécaut’s book minimized the class component in favor of the political role of intellectuals in society who, by allying with the state, acted as partners in the official project of national modernization. The focus of this argument rested on the content and ideas expressed by major thinkers in successive political contexts. Pécaut assumed a degree of preexisting harmony between the doctrinal orientation of intellectuals and the priorities of important sectors of the civilian and military elite. According to this reasoning, the structural manifestation of intellectuals’ political commitments met no resistance from an incipient cultural field exercising its newfound autonomy. Embracing Mannheim’s noted description of intellectuals as a “free-floating” social layer, Pécaut describes these intellectuals as without clientelistic entanglements or dependence on the social order and were thus able to formulate and execute a victorious “project” in assuming command of the regime. The author prioritizes the effective impact of intellectuals on the political system and the corporate strategies they employed in order to assert their interests as a distinct social category. This interpretive bias favoring the primacy of politics downplays the relationship between a budding intellectual field, institutionalized in precarious bases, and a political sphere so arcane as to impose itself on society in almost indecipherable terms. The social assimilation of intellectuals is understood through the lens of their own perspectives and diagnostics, thus the credibility of the entire argument rests only on the judgments and rationalizations of intellectuals themselves. In the absence of an intellectual field endowed with its own hierarchies and a coherent internal value system, this argument suggests that the legitimacy of intellectuals was defined in relation to the purported “blind masses” and the deliberate organization of the political arena.

For their part, the two books by Simon Schwartzman emphasize the construction of institutions of scientific and intellectual activity in the country. The focus here is on the relationship of these scholars to mainstream society, the amount of allocated resources, the evaluation standards of scientific work, the expectations of the scientists themselves, and the educational system that flourished in the new institutions. Similar institutionalist analyses sought to recover the experience of intellectuals during the Vargas period by examining the political and ideological priorities of the Capanema administration. Instead of investigating the patterns of recruitment of intellectuals and their political sponsors, those favoring this interpretation treat educational initiatives as part of a broader project of “conservative modernization.” The latter refers to the changing of the guard between a traditional political elite to a younger, more technical cohort endowed with updated theories of administration and equipped to instill rationality and efficiency throughout the various layers of government. The political careers of this generation of leaders is thus seen to be the dominant pattern of professional mobility within the elite, emptying intellectual life of its substance and stakes.

The institutionalist argument stresses the political impact of the Catholic Church’s attempts to manipulate the state and sway intellectual laity, committed as it was to deepening the church’s influence in areas of activity like education, culture, and health that received the largest chunk of church-affiliated resources. Nevertheless, the institutionalist view tends to reduce the political status conferred on the church to that assigned to other forces competing for cultural legitimacy. By confining the role of intellectuals to their political and institutional impact, this line of reasoning neutralizes the various outlets of cultural production (magazines, publishers, academic departments, etc.), thereby overlooking the pillars of their ideological sustenance and their explicit and implicit class identities.

Primary Sources

Memoirs, diaries, biographies, interviews, testimonials, and biographical dictionaries were the main sources for my study of intellectuals in the period cited above. These types of documents allow the researcher to grasp the relations between positions occupied by various categories of intellectuals as well as their self-assessments of what they were exposed to. This includes, for example, the way they represent themselves in relation to their work, which reveals something about the demands made upon intellectuals by their mentors and audience. Making sense of these materials requires some reflection as to the social and historical conditions in which they were produced. In addition to biographical data on social origin, schooling, and career path, often encountered in conventional sources of literary history, memoirs and biographies reveal the experiences through which intellectuals sought to justify their “vocation” and how they recounted the circumstances behind their literary inclinations.

Devoting special attention to the conventions of these genres also allows researchers to better understand the landscape of intellectual work during this period. While the biographies deal mostly with established writers who achieved prominence in their own lifetime or with authors who received renewed interest according to the shifting priorities of literary scholarship, memoirs offer insights into a much broader swath of writers. The ranks of memoirists include amateur writers whose non-professional aura lends them an unassailable reputation, eclectic freelance writers, and professional politicians for whom the writing of a memoir was the height of intellectual production. Intellectuals who achieved prominence in their own lifetime only rarely produced memoirs, either because they perceived the genre to be less prestigious, because they saw their life story as the raw material for a more ambitious aesthetic treatment, or simply because they sought to establish themselves as virtuosic authors more than anything else. Unlike typical memoirists who seek to commend themselves in their work, the great figures of the Brazilian literary scene left to junior scholars the task of deciphering their works. They thus maintained a distant approach to the genre akin to the widespread “stubborn refusal” to stand for election to the Brazilian Academy of Letters. The luminaries could afford to reject institutional commendations which were sometimes granted as payment for political services rendered. Nevertheless, taken together, the work of commentators, editors of anthologies, compilers, critics, curators of bio-bibliographic repertoires, journalists, and other chroniclers of intellectual life permit us to fill the gaps in the official portraits composed by acolytes, hagiographers, and other professional apologists.

The aforementioned sources are available at major university libraries as well as public libraries in Brazil and abroad. Furthermore, most have been republished in editions readily available in many book stores and used book shops. Researchers interested in unpublished sources about intellectuals and artists—correspondence, personal papers, marginalia, press clippings, photographs—can find them in university archives or repositories of intellectual history in Brazil and abroad. Among the main collections of print and iconographic materials for Brazilian intellectual history in the twentieth century are the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros (Universidade de São Paulo); Fundação Casa de Ruy Barbosa (Rio de Janeiro/Ministério da Cultura); Bilbioteca Mário de Andrade (Prefeitura de São Paulo); Bilbioteca Nacional (Ministério da Cultura/Rio de Janeiro); Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea/CPDOC (Fundação Getúlio Vargas/Rio de Janeiro); Arquivo Edgar Leunroth (Universidade Estadual de Campinas/Campinas); and the Fundação Joaquim Nabuco (Recife).