Mário de Andrade
![Andrade in 1928](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/Mario_de_andrade_1928b.png)
Andrade was a central figure in the avant-garde movement of São Paulo for twenty years. Trained as a musician and best known as a poet and novelist, Andrade was personally involved in virtually every discipline that was connected with São Paulo modernism. His photography and essays on a wide variety of subjects, from history to literature and music, were widely published. He was the driving force behind the Modern Art Week, the 1922 event that reshaped both literature and the visual arts in Brazil, and a member of the avant-garde "Group of Five". The ideas behind the Week were further explored in the preface to his poetry collection ''Pauliceia Desvairada'', and in the poems themselves.
After working as a music professor and newspaper columnist, he published his great novel, ''Macunaíma'', in 1928. Work on Brazilian folk music, poetry, and other concerns followed unevenly, often interrupted by Andrade's shifting relationship with the Brazilian government. At the end of his life, he became the founding director of São Paulo's Department of Culture, formalizing a role he had long held as a catalyst of the city's—and the nation's—entry into artistic modernity. Provided by Wikipedia