................................
THE TEAM
CONTACT
In 1936 Gilberto Freyre was also invited by the publisher José Olympio Pereira Filho to take over management of and edit the Coleção Documentos Brasileiros (Brazilian Documents Collection) to be launched that same year. More important than the considerable salary, which he could add to his salary as a professor at the recently founded University of the Federal District in Rio de Janeiro – a post he had held since 1935 – the offer represented the opportunity to occupy a privileged position within one of the main publishing houses in the country and thus to intervene more directly in producing and circulating ideas. By accepting the invitation and enjoying total autonomy to decide on the titles in the series, he not only gained a potential space for his own future books but also, and especially, the real possibility to expand his efforts beyond his own work in order to bring about a regeneration of knowledge about Brazil. In addition to this, he also took advantage of his position to establish an action programme centred around his own intellectual interests.
His presentation text to the first volume in the aptly titled Documentos Brasileiros collection - Sergio Buarque de Holanda’s Raízes do Brasil [Roots of Brazil] – already clearly showed this as it emulated the foundations of his own individual work, beginning with the attention devoted to the historical nature of memoirs, biographies, travel books and “a [whole] variety of material as yet largely untouched”. The “intimate history” of society, called for at the opening of Casa-grande & senzala, would also reappear in his reference to those “who seek to know the Brazilian past in its greater intimacy”, as well as his emphasis on the diversified nature of history and on the need to approach it with “humility”, without however failing to break its rigidity in order to “humanize it”.
Consequently, there was nothing more logical than that the authors listed as collaborators on the project, ranging from friends such as Octavio Tarquínio de Sousa, Olívio Montenegro and Sergio Buarque himself to researchers linked to the modern social sciences and to academia in Brazil and outside such as Heloisa Alberto Torres, Donald Pierson, Pierre Deffontaines and Percy Alvin Martin, had a great affinity with the editor. In other words, the design of the collection was nothing more than a well-planned extension to the intellectual casa-grande built by Freyre, who administered it with great zeal up until 1938 when he decided to give up the job (also giving up his professorship at the University of the Federal District the same year, whether a coincidence or not); nevertheless, he always remained close to the project and to José Olympio, the editor and publisher, who in fact became responsible for publishing most of his work, including Casa-grande & senzala, until the end of the century.
