Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa published almost nothing in book form while he lived and left roughly twenty-five thousand pages in a trunk. Born in Lisbon in 1888 and schooled in Durban, where his stepfather was Portuguese consul, he wrote in English as well as Portuguese and earned his living translating commercial correspondence for Lisbon import houses. What he built instead of a career was a set of other writers: Alberto Caeiro, a plain-spoken shepherd; Ricardo Reis, a classicist composing odes; Álvaro de Campos, a naval engineer given to long Whitmanesque outbursts. He called them heteronyms rather than pen names, gave each a biography and a manner, and had them read and criticise one another in print. The Book of Disquiet, assembled from the trunk decades after his death in 1935, is credited to a fourth, Bernardo Soares. Mensagem, a sequence on Portuguese history, was the only Portuguese collection he saw published. Almost everything now read as his major work reached print after he was dead.