This article aims to analyse the treatment given by the Brazilian Estado Novo (1937-1945) to Machado de Assis, after the official celebrations of the birth centenary of the author of Dom Casmurro, in 1939. If in the year of Machado's centennial the government raised him to the status of the greatest Brazilian writer, in the early 1940s, under the Department of Press and Propaganda (DIP), the tone was different: in the context of the prevalence of social and documentary conceptions of art, Getúlio Vargas himself, the ideologue Cassiano Ricardo and major estadonovista journals criticized the alleged absenteeism and lack of "local color" in the work of the founder of Brazilian Academy of Letters.
Machado de Assis; Cassiano Ricardo; Estado Novo; Getúlio Vargas; Department of Press and Propaganda