novelist, essayist, journalist, and literary critic whose works of fiction embrace universal themes within the provincial setting of Brazil's rural northeast.

His literary career began in the early 1930s under the aegis of the Neo-Catholic writers' group (Tasso da Silveira and Andrade Murici, among others) of Rio de Janeiro. Until the late 1940s he dedicated his energies principally to journalism in periodicals such as O Correio da Manhã and the Revista do Brasil. He subsequently established a column of literary criticism in the Jornal de Letras and began to publish translations of English-language fiction (notably the works of Graham Greene, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner).

For a time in the 1950s Adonias Filho served as director of the National Book Institute and worked in the National Theatrical Service. He subsequently became director of the National Library and was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 1965. In 1972 he was elected president of the Brazilian Press Association.

His career as a writer of fiction was launched in the 1940s with the publication of Os Servos da Morte (1946; “The Servants of Death”), the first of three novels depicting life in the cacao-growing region of northeastern Brazil. Memórias de Lázaro (1952; Memories of Lazarus) and O Forte (1965; “The Fortress”) complete the trilogy. In 1962 he published the novel Corpo Vivo (“Living Body”), which maintains the dreamlike ambience that characterizes the trilogy. The novel Noite sem madrugada (“Night Without Dawn”) was published in 1983.