Aluísio Azevedo (Aluísio Tancredo Gonçalves de Azevedo, from 1857 to 1913) was a Brazilian novelist, a central name of naturalism in Brazil, author of O Mulato, Casa de Pensão, and The Slum. He was born in São Luís do Maranhão on 14 April 1857, the son of the Portuguese vice-consul David Gonçalves de Azevedo, and was the younger brother of the playwright Artur Azevedo.
In 1876 he went to Rio de Janeiro to study at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts and earned his living as a caricaturist in the illustrated newspapers of the Court. With his father's death, he returned to São Luís in 1878, where he published a first novel of a romantic bent, Uma lágrima de mulher (1879), and, in 1881, O Mulato, which caused a scandal in the city. In the same year he returned to Rio, now to live by his writing.
In the 1880s he was one of the few Brazilian writers to try to live by literature alone, writing on two fronts: fast-paced serials, such as Mistérios da Tijuca and Memórias de um condenado, and novels in which he applied the naturalist method, such as Casa de Pensão (1884), O Homem (1887), and The Slum (1890).
In 1895 he entered the consular career by examination and practically left fiction behind. In 1897 he was among the founders of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, where he held chair 4. He served as consul in Vigo, in Spain, in Yokohama, in Japan, and in Argentina, and he died in Buenos Aires, where he was serving, on 21 January 1913.
On Clavis: The Slum.