José Maria de Eça de Queirós Net Worth

Background and career

José Maria de Eça de Queiroz or Queirós (European Portuguese: [ˈɛsɐ ðɨ kɐjˈɾɔʃ]; 25 November 1845 – 16 August 1900) was a Portuguese author, journalist and diplomat.

Born in northern Portugal, he earned a law degree from the University of Coimbra before being appointed a local administrative official in Leiria, the town that would later serve as the setting of his breakthrough novel in the realist style, The Crime of Father Amaro. He then embarked on a diplomatic career as Portuguese consul in Havana, Newcastle upon Tyne, Bristol and Paris, where he died in 1900, aged 54.

The beginnings of his literary career are inextricably linked to his role as a leading member of the Generation of '70, alongside such figures as Antero de Quental and Oliveira Martins, a group of young radical intellectuals committed to artistic reform who denounced late Portuguese Romanticism as outmoded and intellectually barren. Eça's works, modelled on French Realism and Zola's scientifically-minded naturalist school, chronicle his country's cultural decline and ennui during the last decades of the Portuguese monarchy. They are often satirical in tone, inasmuch as they are set against the backdrop of, and wryly interrogate, the bourgeois social mores, hypocrisies and institutions of late-19th-century Portugal. As in much of realist literature, adultery and sexuality are recurring themes. They also frequently contain an anticlerical streak, lampooning what he and his fellow members of the Generation of '70 believed to be the Catholic Church's deleterious influence on Portuguese society in fostering cultural stagnation and complacency, and helping preserve a conservative social order.

Eça de Queiroz is generally considered the greatest Portuguese writer in the realist style, and regarded across the Portuguese-speaking world as one of its literary greats. Zola considered him greater than Flaubert himself. In the London Observer, Jonathan Keates ranked him alongside Dickens, Balzac and Tolstoy.