The Slum was written by Aluísio Azevedo (1857 to 1913), a novelist from Maranhão, and published in 1890. It is the best-known novel of Brazilian naturalism and the greatest of his novels.
Aluísio was born in São Luís do Maranhão on 14 April 1857, the son of a Portuguese vice-consul and 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 lived as a caricaturist in the illustrated newspapers of the Court, and that draftsman's eye stayed in his prose: his novels work by tableaux and by crowds seen from outside.
With O Mulato, of 1881, which exposed the prejudice and hypocrisy of Maranhão society and caused a scandal in São Luís, he opened naturalism in Brazil. In the 1880s he tried to live by writing alone, on two fronts: serialized novels with fast-moving plots, paid by the chapter, and novels of observing the milieu, in the manner of Zola, such as Casa de Pensão (1884), O Homem (1887) and The Slum (1890). The Slum came out two years after the Golden Law and months after the proclamation of the Republic.
In 1895 Aluísio entered the consular career by competitive examination and practically abandoned fiction. He was one of the founders of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, in 1897, and died in Buenos Aires, where he was serving, on 21 January 1913. The critic Otto Maria Carpeaux gives him the primacy of naturalism in Latin America, in date and in value, and in the same breath calls him not very original.