Aluísio Azevedo championed the naturalist method in literature, and he was linked to the cause of the abolition of slavery. While still in São Luís, he helped launch and contributed to O Pensador, an anticlerical newspaper that advocated abolition.
In literature, he championed through his own work the direct observation of the social environment and of human groupings. O Mulato, of 1881, caused a scandal in São Luís for its raw language and its subject, racial prejudice, and was received in the capital as an example of naturalism. Then came Casa de Pensão, of 1884, and The Slum, of 1890, in which the collective house and those who live in it are the center of the novel.
On Clavis: The Slum.