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THE TEAM
CONTACT
At the beginning of the 1940s, Gilberto Freyre was recognized as being one of the most important Brazilian intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century, if not the most important. This position, based on the success of his books, his collaboration with various Brazilian and foreign newspapers and journals as well as his activity as a conference speaker and professor both inside and outside Brazil, allowed him to live as an independent scholar, with no binding contractual ties of a professional or institutional nature, or, as he liked to say, simply as a writer. Casa-grande & senzala increasingly established itself as his major work, from which his key ideas radiated through the whole of the rest of his output (at times overshadowing it), which, already not small, continued to expand to the point that the prolific writer proposed to José Olympio and even insisted that he collect all his work together in its own collection, the “Gilbertiana”, a dream that finally came true in 1958 with the official name of “The Collected Works of Gilberto Freyre”. From that time on, and increasingly as the years passed, there were frequent invitations, tributes, awards and titles and he was even made a Knight Commander of the British Empire in 1971.
As to his personal life, he married Maria Magdalena Guedes Pereira in 1941 with whom he had two children, Fernando and Sonia, and they settled in the Recife neighbourhood of Apipucos, in an old mansion that today is the Magdalena and Gilberto Freyre Museum-House and headquarters of the Gilberto Freyre Foundation. At this point, he also took up political life again, but this time as a federal deputy; elected in 1945, after the end of Getúlio Vargas’ Estado Novo [New State], by the conservative União Democrática Nacional (UDN – National Democratic Union), he became involved in the work to draft a new Constitution, promulgated in 1946. He was also on the Education and Culture Committee of the Chamber of Deputies during his mandate, which lasted until January 1951 when he failed to be re-elected. His main project, approved in 1949, was to set up the Joaquim Nabuco Institute of Social Research, today the Joaquim Nabuco Foundation (Fundaj), which rapidly made its mark as one of the most important research centres in the country. He himself ran courses and conferences there, as he also did at the Federal University of Pernambuco from 1966 to 1979 with his Tropicology Seminars (transferred in 1980 to Fundaj). Although he did not go back into politics again, he remained very close to the political arena especially after the 1964 military coup which brought in the dictatorship that lasted until 1985. Although he refused various posts in the generals’ government, such as those of Minister for Education and Culture and Brazilian Ambassador to UNESCO, he supported the regime and did not shrink from collaborating with institutions like the Federal Council of Culture or the government party, ARENA - National Renewal Alliance Party, a position that betrayed his conservative (for some, reactionary) politics and ended by tainting the academic appreciation of his work for a long while.
