JORGE ANDRADE has been the sensitive historian and understanding judge of a fast-disappearing society. He has lived and felt the subjects of his plays either directly, or by hearsay, study, and meditation; but in general he has written about them most objectively. The first completely successful modern Brazilian playwright, Jorge Andrade has done for Sao Paulo what the novelists and dramatists of the Northeast, and Erico Verissimo in Rio Grande do Sul, have been accomplishing for their regions, for Brazil, and for the world since the 1930's. Regionalism and Modernism have blended to give modern Brazilian culture its leading characteristics. Brazilian literature in general has tended to be self-conscious, dedicated to the national effort to be distinctive, particularly vis-a-vis Portugal. This pragmatic attitude, while usually beneficial to the nation, has often been prejudicial from an aesthetic point of view, sometimes lacking imaginative play to the extent that belles-lettres is no longer an appropriate term. The element of selfanalysis in behalf of a new society, restricted as it often is to the purely local, may compromise not only the art but universality of a work. Various phases in Brazil's history have counterbalanced these tendencies in large part. The youthful vigor of Brazilian literature has been socially very useful because of its historical sense and power of communication, which are essential ingredients of authentic literature. The tradition of engagement, apart from its utilitarian values, has been artistically stimulating and often successful. Witness the novel of the Northeast, the work of Erico Verissimo, and theater since the 1950's. A certain reaction against Positivism in favor of more spiritual values placed emphasis on the reform of poetry during the first phase of literary Modernism. After 1930, however, the reform spread to prose fiction, which had undergone considerable transformation through the Romantic and Realist periods; but it was the revolutionary spirit and experimentalism of Modernism that brought them out of the sphere of European influence and made for uniquely Brazilian expression in these as in other genres. As regards content, much progress had be n achieved to incorporate the Brazilian scene by various nativist movements such as Indianism. In fact, most Brazilian literature was regionalistic. Whether rural or urban in nature, however, this literature tended to show man determined by his environment, in keeping with the Naturalism that was then in vogue. In the case of the psychological novel, Symbolism and Impressionism were the predominant European influences. Modernism was to serve a the necessary catalyst to produce something new of the several isms with which Brazilian novelists had already experimented. The result was a more nationalistic regionalism, sometime propagandistic as in the early Jorge Amado, sometimes documentary as in Lins do Rego's Sugar Cane Cycle or Amado's later works of the Cacao Cycle. While Modernism has tended to avoid the historical and the concrete for the spontaneous and spiritual, it has sought to write authentically about Brazil and at the same time develop works of lasting, universal value. Jose' Lins do Rego had good reason to be in sympathy with Modernism. He believed in free expression, social themes, and above all the regional basis. Yet there was one important contradiction: he was primarily a memorialist, not only looking to the past, but to a declining society and degenerate individuals, while the Modernists generally turned optimistically to the future. Perhaps still more than in Graciliano Ramos's, memory plays a greater role than imagination in his works, with the best, most representative ones based very directly on his experience. Accordingly, his first novel, Menino de Engenho, is almost literally repeated in Meus Verdes Anos, the first volume of his memoirs. Moreover, these