Joaquim Lúcio Cardoso Filho (August 14, 1912 – September 22, 1968) was a Brazilian novelist, playwright, and poet.

Biography

Lúcio Cardoso was born into a poor but well-known family in Curvelo, Minas Gerais. He was the brother of Adauto Lúcio Cardoso, who later became a member of the National Democratic Union and a justice of the Supreme Federal Court. He also had a sister, Maria Helena Cardoso, who became a respected writer. She edited the posthumous memoirs of her brother, including Por onde andou meu coração (1967), Vida-vida (1973), and Sonata perdida: Anotações de uma velha dama digna (1979).

As a young man, Cardoso attended school in Belo Horizonte and later moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he worked for the Equitativa insurance company. His writing caught the attention of Augusto Frederico Schmidt, a wealthy industrialist and poet who supported many writers. Schmidt helped publish Cardoso’s early works. Many of these writers, including Otávio de Faria and Cornélio Penna, were Catholic. Both Cardoso and Otávio de Faria were also homosexual. During a time when Brazilian literature often focused on political and regional themes, Cardoso and others instead wrote about personal experiences, human redemption, and tragedy. This focus on personal feelings was also shared by Clarice Lispector, a younger writer who became a close friend of Cardoso.

Cardoso’s first novel, Maleita (Malaria), told the story of an engineer trapped in a remote area of Minas Gerais. This book followed common regionalist themes, but after 1936, Cardoso shifted to writing about people’s inner thoughts and emotions in his third novel, Luz no Subsolo.

Cardoso wrote many works across different genres. With Abdias do Nascimento, an Afro-Brazilian activist, he helped create the Teatro Experimental do Negro, Brazil’s first black theater company. He also collaborated with Paulo César Saraceni on Porto das caixas, the first full-length film from the Cinema Novo movement, based on a real crime in Itaboraí, a rural area in Rio de Janeiro. His most famous novel, Crônica da casa assassinada (1959), tells the story of a decaying family in Minas Gerais. A character named Timóteo, the family’s gay son, lives alone in the family home, wearing his mother’s old clothes, and represents the breakdown of the family’s old traditions.

Cardoso was a well-known figure in Rio de Janeiro’s artistic community. One friend joked that the neighborhood of Ipanema should be named after him. His health worsened due to alcoholism and drug use. On December 7, 1962, he suffered a serious stroke that left him partially paralyzed. He could not regain his ability to speak or write and turned to painting instead.

On September 22, 1968, after another stroke, Cardoso died in Rio de Janeiro.