Jorge Amado is simultaneously one of Brazil’s most prolific and widely read novelists and one of its most controversial. This volume seeks to offer his English-speaking audience the same range of critical thinking that surrounds his work in Brazil. The book contains an introduction and chronology to Amado’s life, followed by a comprehensive survey of his major works by some of the world’s leading Latin American Studies scholars. As the case of Jorge Amado is central to the emergence of Brazilian literature in the 20th-century, the aim of this volume of original essays is to place him in clearer critical perspective for English language readers.