Manuel de Oliveira Lima

File:Joaquim nabuco oliveira lima.jpg

From left to right: Graça Aranha, Silvino Gurgel do Amaral, Joaquim Nabuco, Domício da Gama and Oliveira Lima (1901)

Manuel de Oliveira Lima (25 December 1867 – 24 March 1928) was a Brazilian writer, literary critic, diplomat, historian, and journalist. He represented Brazil in several countries and was a visiting professor at Harvard University. Oliveira Lima was a founding member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.

Biography

Oliveira Lima started working as a journalist at the age of fourteen at Correio do Brazil, a newspaper he founded in Lisbon. In 1887, he graduated from the Curso Superior de Letras, which would later become the Faculdade de Letras of the University of Lisbon. In 1890, Oliveira Lima began working for the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He served as a diplomat in Portugal, Belgium, Germany, Japan, Venezuela, England, and the United States. He was chargé d'affaires of the first Brazilian diplomatic mission in Japan. In 1901, he gave an opinion against the Brazilian project to receive Japanese immigrants.

He was even talked about for the Brazilian embassy in London but the Senate did not approve his nomination. Oliveira Lima was disliked by the British government for defending the ideal of Brazil remaining neutral in World War I and for his intellectual proximity to Germany. He also made enemies within the country, partly for not approving the expansionist attitude of the Republic in situations such as the annexation of Acre carried out by the Baron of Rio Branco.

Oliveira Lima was noted specially as a writer. Part of his reputation as a Germanophile comes from the praise he lavished on German philosophical works when he was a literary critic. He was the author of the third Brazilian book about Japan, published in 1903. The biography he wrote about King João VI is considered one of the most important works about this historical figure. He was a close friend of Gilberto Freyre and exchanging letters with Machado de Assis.

A passionate bibliophile, he collected books throughout his life and assembled the third largest private collection of Brazil, second only to the National Library and the library of the University of São Paulo. In 1916, Oliveira Lima donated his enormous library to the Catholic University of Washington, and moved there in 1920. He imposed the condition that he himself would be the first librarian and organizer of the collection, a function he performed until his death, when he was succeeded by his wife Flora de Oliveira Lima. The Oliveira Lima Library, located at the Catholic University of Washington, has 58 thousand books, besides correspondence exchanged with intellectuals, more than six hundred paintings, and countless scrapbooks from newspapers. Also part of the collection is one of the three busts of Dom Pedro I sculpted by Marc Ferrez (uncle of the homonymous photographer), the only one of the three made in bronze.

In 1924 he became professor of International Law at the Catholic University of America. In the same year he was appointed honorary professor at the Faculty of Law of Recife. He died in 1928 and was buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery. His tombstone does not bear his name, but the phrase "Here lies a friend of books".

Works

• Pernambuco e Seu Desenvolvimento Histórico (1894)
• Aspectos da Literatura Colonial Brasileira (1896)
• Sete Anos de República (1896)
• Historia Diplomatica do Brasil: O Reconhecimento do Imperio (1901)
• O Reconhecimento do Império (1902)
• No Japão (1903)
• Pan-americanismo: Monroe, Bolivar, Roosevelt (1907)
• La Langue Portugaise, la Littérature Brésilienne (1909)
• D. João VI no Brasil (1909)
• Machado de Assis et Son Oeuvre Littéraire (1909)
• Formation Historique de la Nationalité Brésilienne (1911)
• Evolução Histórica da América Latina Comparada com a América Inglesa (1914)
• História da Civilização (1921)
• O Movimento da Independência (1922)
• Aspectos da História e da Cultura do Brasil (1923)
• D. Pedro e D. Miguel (1925)

Translated into English

• The Relations of Brazil with the United States (1913)
• The Evolution of Brazil Compared with that of Spanish and Anglo-Saxon America (1914)
• "The Influence of European Thought on Brazilian Literature," Transations of the Royal Society of Literature of the United Kingdom, Vol. XXXIII (1915)

References

• Gomes, Ângela de Castro (2005). Em Família: A Correspondência de Oliveira Lima e Gilberto Freyre. Campinas: Mercado de Letras.
• Gouvea, Fernando da Cruz (1976). Oliveira Lima: Uma Biografia. Recife: Instituto Histórico e Geográfico de Pernambuco.
• Malatian, Teresa (2001). Oliveira Lima e a Construção da Nacionalidade. Bauru: EDUSC.
• Mota, Carlos Guilherme (2010). "Oliveira Lima e a Nossa Formação." In: História e Contra-História: Perfis e Contrapontos. Rio de Janeiro: Globo.

External links

• Works by Manuel de Oliveira Lima at Gallica

Academic offices
Patron: Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen	1st Academic of the 39th chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters 1897–1928	Succeeded by Alberto de Faria