Gilberto Freyre was arguably the most famous intellectual of twentieth-century Latin America. He was active as a sociologist, a historian, a journalist, a deputy in the Brazilian Assembly, a novelist, poet and artist. He was a cultural critic, with a good deal to say about architecture, past and present, and a public intellectual, whose pronouncements on race, region and empire - not to mention sex - made him famous in some quarters and notorious in others.
The Masters and the Slaves, his most famous work, went through forty editions and has been translated into nine languages,...