ABSTRACT
Just as had occurred with Casa de Alvenaria and her subsequent books following the unprecedented success of her first diary, Quarto de Despejo, Carolina Maria de Jesus's autobiographical Diário de Bitita sold poorly when it appeared in 1986. Critics dismissed it as irrelevant. Several reasons explain this. The mid-1980s were a time of tension in Brazil over the return to civilian rule after two decades of military dictatorship, and for complex reasons, Brazilian readers did not consider Carolina's story of her childhood squalor worthy of comment or debate. In the years since Carolina's death in 1977, moreover, many Brazilians had come to believe the untruthful supposition spread about Carolina in 1960 when Quarto had been published: that she could not have written something as perceptive as her diaries and that therefore they must have been the work of Dantas, her Svengali. This interpretation continued to be held even into the early 1990s, when new evidence was brought to light attesting to the authenticity of her written work and the fact that she had written thousands of diary entries and other writings neither published nor known to persons beyond her family. 1
