This book provides critical thinking on one of Brazil's most prolific and widely read novelists for his English-speaking audience, providing an introduction and chronology of his life and a comprehensive survey of his major works.

With his works currently translated into thirty-three languages, Jorge Amado is undoubtedly Brazil's best-known author abroad, a fact that, ironically, has had both positive and negative repercussions at home: on the one hand, Amado is a tremendously popular writer with a long record of advocacy on behalf of Brazil's economically disadvantaged and marginalized peoples; on the other, he has been accused of sexism and sexual stereotyping, of utilizing too many scenes of excessive violence against women, of romanticizing poverty, and of perpetuating what have been described as paternalistic racial views. But no one can deny the importance of Jorge Amado's contribution to modern Brazilian narrative, where his skills and charm as a storyteller merge Brazil's oral tradition with its written. Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, with whom he is compared, Amado knows how to make the local or particular express the universal.

In Jorge Amado: New Critical Essays, sixteen of the world's leading Latin American Studies scholars provide a comprehensive survey of Amado's works, addressing his religion and his revolution, his portrayals of women, his place in postmodern reconstruction, and his legacy in Brazil.