With the objective of preserving and making known the works of the Brazilian writer Jorge Amado, Fundação Casa de Jorge Amado has been carrying out, in the course of its seventeen years of operation, a systematic work of research and cataloguing of the texts which are part of its collection, organizing them and making them accessible to researchers and other interested individuals.

Due to their historical value and unquestionable aesthetic quality, some of those texts have come out in new editions and new graphic designs, allowing for a more practical access of information for those who study the author’s works.

For that reason, Jorge Amado’s Discursos Acadêmicos and journals of the trip he took in 1938/39 were published. Those had come out initially in the newspaper Dom Casmurro and in the Literary Supplement of the magazine Diretrizes. Later on they were gathered and organized in a book by Professor Raul Antelo, from the Federal University of Santa Catarina under the title Ronda das Américas.

With the publication of A letter to a reader on novels and characters, Fundação Casa de Jorge Amado not only moves on with its project of publishing texts witch so far had not been published, but it also does provide Amado’s readers with the opportunity of following up on the birth of some of the writer’s most fascinating characters in Brazilian literature.

The text was written at first to illustrate a 1971 calendar, a fact which now imposes some limitation on its status of and published work. On the other hand, due to the ephemeral nature of that publication, a new edition becomes fully justified. Had this not been the case, the text would be have been left to a restricted and episodical existence instead of coming out as a document of real interest in the creation of the characters which populate Jorge Amado’s universe.

Therefore in publishing this carefully designed edition enriched with illustrations by outstanding Bahian artists such as Carybé, Calasans Neto, Mário Cravo, Jenner Augusto, Floriano Teixeira – to whom respects are equally paid due to the close relationship they all had with the author – Fundação Casa de Jorge Amado, with the kind support of BRASKEM, once more reaffirms its commitment to preserving and making known the literary works of its patron.

Written by Myriam Fraga