Joaquim Lúcio Cardoso Filho, known as Lúcio Cardoso (Curvelo, Minas Gerais, Brazil, August 14, 1913 - Rio de Janeiro, September 22, 1968) was a Brazilian novelist, playwright, and poet.
The son of an impoverished but prominent family in Minas Gerais, Lúcio Cardoso was the brother of Adauto Lúcio Cardoso, a senator for the center-right União Democrática Nacional and later member of the Supreme Federal Court; and of Maria Helena Cardoso, who became a respected writer herself as a memorialist, including the editing of the posthumous memoirs of her brother Lúcio (Por onde andou meu coração, 1967; Vida-vida, 1973; and Sonata perdida: Anotações de uma velha dama digna, 1979).
At an early age, having flunked out of or been expelled by several schools, Cardoso moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he got a job in an insurance company.[1] He soon came to the notice of the group of writers around the wealthy industrialist (and a poet himself) Augusto Frederico Schmidt, who published his first works. Many of these writers, including Octávio de Faria and Cornélio Penna, were, like Cardoso, fervently Catholic - and, in the twin case of Cardoso and Octávio de Faria, both Catholic and homosexual. In a time when Brazilian literature was dominated by leftist, regionalist themes, these writers were less interested in the then-dominant political concerns of Brazilian writing as they were in the inner experience and what they felt as a need for personal salvation. This paramount value placed upon the subjective character of writing was a characteristic Cardoso shared also with his younger contemporary Clarice Lispector, who fell in love with Cardoso when she was an adolescent, and who remained a close friend until his death.
Cardoso was enormously prolific in several genres, including the theater, where, together with the Afro-Brazilian activist Abdias do Nascimento, he started the Teatro Experimental do Negro, Brazil's first black theater company. With Paulo César Saraceni, he was responsible for the first feature-length film of the nascent Cinema Novo, Porto das caixas - based on a true history about a popular miracle said to have happened in the municipality of Itaboraí, then a backwater rural community in the State of Rio de Janeiro. Perhaps his most famous novel is Crônica da casa assassinada (Chronicle of the Murdered House, 1959, a long, Faulknerian story of a decayed gentry family in Minas Gerais.
A famous figure in the bohemian milieu of Rio de Janeiro--"Ipanema should be called Lúcio Cardoso," according to one friend[2]--his health deteriorated because of his alcoholism and dependence on prescription drugs. On December 7, 1962, at the height of his creativity, he suffered a terrible stroke.[3] He struggled unsuccessfully to recover his ability to speak and write, and when that failed he turned to painting.
On September 22, 1968, following another stroke, he died in Rio de Janeiro.