Machado de Assis: Multiracial Identity and the Brazilian Novelist - Paperbackby G. Reginald Daniel (Author) Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839 1908) was Brazil's foremost novelist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a mulatto, Machado experienced the ambiguity of racial identity throughout his life. Literary critics first interpreted Machado as an embittered misanthrope uninterested in the plight of his fellow African Brazilians. By midcentury, however, a new generation of critics asserted that Machado's