Thechronicleinventsthecarioca

Since the 19th century, the light genre of the "crônica" had been one of the favorites among Rio's readers and writers. The leading names of our literature masterfully dominated this brief, everyday form, made to fade away with each new daily edition of newspapers and magazines of the time. With José de Alencar and Machado de Assis as two founders of the Rio de Janeiro way of writing the "crônica," each generation produced names fundamental to the genre's evolution.

Olavo Bilac, Lima Barreto, João do Rio, and the young Manuel Bandeira are authors celebrated in their time who passed the torch to the generation of Cecília Meireles, Marques Rebelo, Rubem Braga, Graciliano Ramos, Rachel de Queiroz, Vinícius de Moraes, Mario Quintana, and Paulo Mendes Campos.

Image description: This is a black-and-white photograph of six men posing in a garden. On the left side, there is a statue of a nude human figure. The men are arranged in two rows: three seated in chairs in the foreground and three standing behind them. They are all wearing suits and ties. The spatial arrangement goes from left to right, with the statue on the left and the seated and standing men arranged in a straight line.

Starting in the 1950s, the chronicle gained even more strength, making some of the greatest names in our literature into eternal references – such as Clarice Lispector, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, and Nelson Rodrigues.

This list must also include unavoidable names such as Stanislaw Ponte Preta (Sérgio Porto), Antônio Maria, Otto Lara Resende, Carlinhos Oliveira, Carlos Heitor Cony, and Elsie Lessa.

Image description: This is a black-and-white photograph of three people disembarking from a plane. The woman on the left, wearing a fitted-waist dress and high-heeled shoes, holds a folded handkerchief. Beside her is a boy in a school uniform, holding a book. On the right, a man in a suit and tie carries a suitcase and a coat. They are all exiting a plane with its door open, and on the floor in front of them is a sign that reads "RIO DE JANEIRO."

The chronicles of these generations gradually built a multifaceted portrait of Rio de Janeiro and its inhabitants. Interestingly, many of the chroniclers who stood out throughout the genre's golden decades (1940-1980) were not native-born Cariocas, but chose the city as their home and literary imagination.

At the turn of the 1930s into the 1940s, when Brazil changed its political profile and entered a long period governed by Getúlio Vargas, one author established himself as the country's greatest chronicle writer: Rubem Braga, from the state of Espírito Santo, who had contributed to newspapers in his hometown since he was very young. Braga appeared in Rio's newspapers in the 1940s and redefined, for later generations, not only the style of the chronicle -- making it more literary and concise -- but also the very role of the literary writer within newspapers.

Since his first published text, in the Diário da Tarde, in Belo Horizonte, in 1932, already as a chronicler Rubem Braga wrote for the press of different cities, such as Recife, Porto Alegre and São Paulo - where he wrote for the Diário de São Paulo and had his chronicles read throughout the country, thanks to their republication in the newspapers of Assis Chateaubriand's Diários Associados.

When trying to settle in Rio, in the 1940s, to write news stories for the Diário Carioca, Rubem would still have to travel, whether for political or professional reasons. Starting in the 1960s, living permanently in Rio - in his famous penthouse in Ipanema -, he expanded his fame and became an intellectual and bohemian reference point of the city.

Image description: This is a black-and-white photograph. In the image, we see an elderly man standing in a garden. He is wearing pants and a shirt, holding a branch with leaves. In the background, there is a statue of a woman and green plants. On the left, there is text in Portuguese, mentioning "Humor" and the name "Rubem Braga." The text describes the humor and the things Rubem Braga observes in Ipanema.

Either way, wherever he was, his keen chronicler's eye would keep influencing an entire generation of writers and poets. His work produced a definitive, lyrical view of Rio's settings, such as its beaches, suburbs, bars, and street corners.

It was, in fact, in the 1960s that the chronicle gained a definitive status as a Carioca genre, with expressive names of the genre in the pages of Jornal do Brasil, such as Clarice Lispector, author of some of the most literary chronicles of her generation, the Minas Gerais native Carlos Drummond de Andrade, and Carlinhos Oliveira, a native of Espírito Santo from the same city as Rubem Braga, yet utterly Carioca in his texts written at bar tables in Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon. In O Globo, the city delighted in the provocative chronicles of the Pernambuco-born playwright and writer Nelson Rodrigues.

This abundance of first-rate chroniclers gave the genre a strength that echoed through decades, with the writings of Ivan Lessa, Millôr Fernandes, Aldir Blanc, Joaquim Ferreira dos Santos, and so many others who continue to turn the daily life of the carioca into the fine material of their literary impressions.