Carlos Drummond de Andrade once wondered why newspapers always called him a poet, for he judged his “journalistic output . . . incomparably superior” to his poetry; “in fact, I am a journalist,” he declared in 1984 (vol. 3, pp. 16, 181). While it is well known that Brazilian writers from Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis to Jorge Amado wrote extensively for periodicals (and usually started their writing careers in newspapers and magazines), the relationship between this writing and their literary output remains little studied, despite the former's impressive volume. Rachel de Queiroz produced 1,387 articles for the magazine O Cruzeiro alone between 1938 and 1956 (vol. 2, p. 270). Machado de Assis only published about a third of his 200 short stories in books (vol. 1, p. 204), while only about one-tenth of Drummond's 2,432 crônicas (columns) in the Correio da Manhã subsequently appeared in collections (vol. 3, p....

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