notable
Monteiro Lobato was one of Brazil's most influential writers, mostly for his children's books set in the fictional Sítio do Picapau Amarelo ("Yellow Woodpecker Farm").
Sítio do Picapau Amarelo was a small farm in the countryside, featuring the elderly ranch owner Dona Benta ("Mrs. Benta"), her two grandchildren - Lúcia and Narizinho ("Little Nose", because she had a turned-up nose) and a boy, Pedrinho ("Little Pete") - and a black servant and cook, Tia Nastácia ("Aunt Anastacia").
These real characters were complemented by entities created by the children's imagination: the rag doll Emília ("Emilia") and the learned puppet made of corncob Visconde de Sabugosa (roughly "Viscount Corncob"), the cow Mocha, the donkey Conselheiro ("Counsellor"), the pig Rabicó ("Short-Tail") and the rhinoceros Quindim (Quindim is a Brazilian dessert), Saci Pererê (a black, pipe-smoking, one-legged character of Brazilian folklore) and Cuca (an evil monster that kidnaps children at night).
Ariano Suassuna was a Brazilian playwright and author. He was the driving force behind the creation of the Movimento Armorial. He was also an important regional writer, doing various novels set in the Northeast of Brazil. He was the author of, among other works, the Auto da Compadecida ("A Dog's Will"), A Pedra do Reino ("The Stone of the Kingdom"), and A Farsa da Boa Preguiça ("The Farce of Good Laziness"). He was a staunch defender of the culture of the Northeast, and his works dealt with the popular culture of the Northeast.
In 1970 in Recife, the "Armorial Movement" was founded, aimed to develop and understand traditional forms of popular expression.
The critic Mário de Andrade, who specialized in studying Brazilian folklore, became a staunch supporter of "modernist" Brazilian artists who incorporated folkloric material into their work, a process he began in the 1920s in his music and in his paradigmatic work, Macunaíma (1928). His observation that certain classical tunes had been transformed into popular pieces prompted a great deal of interest.
He was a novelist, poet, storyteller, chronicler, literature and art critic, photographer and scholar of Brazilian folklore. One of the founders of the 1922 Modern Art Week, he launched Pauliceia Desvairada, poetry in the same year, a milestone in Brazilian modernism.
Mário valued artistic and cultural manifestations in Brazil, dedicating himself to searching for the defining elements of the national identity.
Luís da Câmara Cascudo became one of the main folklorists and researchers of the country's ethnic roots, being the author of a vast literature on the subject. He compiled a copious collection of folk and popular songs and legends.
His legacy stilll lives, for his performance in institutions, for the collection, systematization and dissemination of a vast amount of popular and erudite sources that are, until today, a rich material for appreciation and study, for the documentation of countless forms and cultural expressions on the verge of disappearing, avoiding their oblivion, by valuing and systematically studying folklore in a period when it was discredited by erudite culture.