Tent of Miracles

Blurb

Tent of Miracles is a Brazilian Modernist novel. It was written by Jorge Amado in 1967 and published the following year. It was later adapted to a 1977 Cinema Novo film by director/screenplay writer Nelson Pereira dos Santos.
Tent of Miracles was written three years after the military overthrew Brazilian democracy, and it is part of a series Amado called "The Bahia Novels", works exploring the region's past. The novel chronicles the chaos that results when a prominent Columbia University professor arrives in Brazil, with nothing but praise on his lips for a long-forgotten local Bahian writer and self-taught social scientist named Pedro Archanjo. The year is 1968, which Levinson announces is the centennial of Archanjo's birth, setting off a media stampede to figure out who Archanjo was so that they can profit from a celebration of his life. When a few people finally uncover who Arcanjo was and what he espoused, media barons and advertisers are horrified to discover that he was an Afro-Brazilian social critic, womanizer and heavy drinker who died penniless in the gutter.