José Antonio Gonsalves de Mello (1916- )
On my first trip to Brazil in the early 1960’s I stopped in Recife, heart of the Northeast, to visit a late middle-aged scholar whose pioneering monographs on colonial history I already knew well. Several were on the seventeenth-century Dutch occupation of the Northeast.
We had an excellent conversation, but it turned tense when he cited a recent U.S. book review in which a well-known U.S. Brazilianist had chided Gilberto Freyre (José’s contemporary and close friend) for having written about colonial Brazil “as if he were enamored of a corpse.”
Another lesson learned: when you write about a foreign country, the citizens will probably read it.
Further Readings
Mello, José. Tempo dos flamengos: influência da ocupação holandesa na vida e na cultura do norte do Brasil. 3a. ed. Brasília: Instituto Nacional do Livro, Fundação Nacional Pró-Memória, 1987.
José Antonio Gonsalves de Mello was born in Recife, Pernambuco. In 1937, he graduated from the School of Law in Recife. He later served as the first director of the Joaquim Nabuco Institute of Social Research. He also contributed historical research to the Institute of Historical and Artistic Heritage. After traveling to the Netherlands, he founded an organization devoted to Brazilian-Dutch research in Rio de Janeiro in 1940. He was later elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters.