Brazil's literary narrative began to emerge only after the country's formal independence from Portugal in 1822, and it gained full force only in the second half of the nineteenth century. While generally accompanying the Western literary tradition's major trends and transformations, it has developed its own voice and matured into an important part of a rich and diverse national literature. It has not always received the international acclaim that has been accorded Spanish American literature, but that perhaps has less to do with quality than with the facts that it is written in Portuguese rather than Spanish and that translations have been rather slow in coming. It was not until the 1950s, for example, that turn-of-the-century writer Machado de Assis, whom Susan Sontag has described as 'the greatest author ever produced in Latin America', was translated into English.

Brazil is a continent-sized country with tremendous disparities in wealth and education. Given the country’s historically high rate of illiteracy and relatively small reading public, fictional narrative has largely been a form of expression produced by and for a privileged minority of Brazilians. In absolute terms the number of people with the cultural disposition and cultural capital necessary to consume literary works has grown progressively over time, as access to public education and literacy has expanded, but it continues to be limited in relation to the country’s total population. Even at the dawn of the twenty-first century, it is not uncommon for a novel’s initial print run to be no more than three thousand copies. Consequently, it has been difficult for writers to subsist on literature alone, and they have often been economically dependent on such occupations as teaching, journalism and particularly government service.