Mário de Sá-Carneiro

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Mário de Sá-Carneiro (19 May 1890 – 26 April 1916) was a Portuguese poet and novelist.

Born in Lisbon into a military family, he lost his mother at the age of two and his grandmother at the age of nine and was cared for in his childhood by a nanny.

He studied Law for a brief period (1911-1912) but soon concentrated on literary work. He knew Fernando Pessoa and Almada Negreiros, among other writers, who would form a literary magazine named Orpheu that made scandal for its radical approach to modernism. In 1912 he travelled to Paris where he intended to study in Sorbonne. Once he was admitted he continued to write in the most vanguard style of his time. Soon after he would enter a deep psychic crisis (perhaps increased by the abuse of opium and alcohol) with a tragic end: he committed suicide by taking five bottles of strychnine at the age of 25 in Paris.

His works include the novel Lúcio's Confession and the short story collection The Great Shadow. Sá-Carneiro's work deals extensively with the issues of obsession, insanity, and solitude.

Sá-Carneiro was a close friend of and collaborator with fellow Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa. Despite such a brief life, Sá Carneiro is usually considered one of the most important and influential Portuguese language poets of the 20th century, which works such as Dispersão (1913) and Indícios de Oiro, which were published posthumously in 1937.^{[citation needed]}