Paula Brito, forgotten writer

Abstract

Francisco de Paula Brito is nowadays known as the first Brazilian black businessman. He also devoted himself to typographic activity and political and cultural journalism. He is extremely important to current book and publishing studies, as he hasrecently been studied as one of the pioneer publisher in Rio de Janeiro's 19ths. In addition to these talents of typographer, publisher, journalist and cultural promoter, he ventured into his own literary writing. This work aims to recover themes and forms of his almost forgotten tales, all of them published in Jornal do Commercio, in 1839. We also reinforce the thesis that he is a kind of forerunner of the short story in Brazil, adding to this original idea that if traditional studies on history of literature had considered in its approaches his short narratives, Paula Brito would have been recognized as a forerunner of themes and forms that would occupy the most canonical Brazilian fiction in the nineteenth century.