Aluísio Azevedo's main work is The Slum, of 1890, the largest of his novels and the best known of Brazilian naturalism. In it the collective housing of Rio de Janeiro becomes almost a living organism and a central character.
The novel follows, at the same time, the rise of the Portuguese shopkeeper João Romão, who builds a tenement of little houses and washtubs for laundresses in Botafogo, and the life of the crowd that lives there: laundresses, quarry workers, capoeira fighters, a young woman waiting for puberty so she can marry. It was published two years after the Lei Áurea (Golden Law) and months after the proclamation of the Republic.
Aluísio's method is already on the first page: the tenement is born from the mud as a living thing. Before The Slum came other novels of observation of the milieu, such as O Mulato (1881) and Casa de Pensão (1884), but the greatest of his novels is The Slum.
On Clavis: The Slum.