Born in Morro do Livramento [pt], Rio de Janeiro, from a poor family, he was the grandson of freed slaves in a country where slavery would not be fully abolished until 49 years later.

In 1893, he published "A Missa do Galo" ("Midnight Mass"), often considered to be the greatest short story in Brazilian literature.

[6][7][8] His parents were Francisco José de Assis, a wall painter, the son of freed slaves,[9] and Maria Leopoldina da Câmara Machado, a Portuguese washerwoman from the Azores.

[6] On 12 January 1855, Francisco de Paula published the poem Ela ("Her") written by Joaquim, then 15 years old, in the newspaper Marmota Fluminense.

[6][7][8] In the following year, he was hired as typographer's apprentice in the Imprensa Oficial (the Official Press, charged with the publication of Government measures), where he was encouraged as a writer by Manuel Antônio de Almeida, the newspaper's director and also a novelist.

[6] There he also met Francisco Otaviano, journalist and later liberal senator, and Quintino Bocaiuva, who decades later would become known for his role as a republican orator.

[12] He established himself in advanced Liberal Party circles by taking stands in defense of religious freedom and Ernest Renan's controversial Life of Jesus while attacking the venality of the clergy.

"[14] With the Liberal Party's ascension to power at that time, Machado thought he might receive a patronage position that would help him improve his life.

[14] He married Carolina on 12 November 1869; although her parents, Miguel and Adelaide, and her siblings disapproved because Machado was of African descent and she was a white woman.

[16] Machado suffered repeated attacks of epilepsy, apparently related to the hearing of the death of his old friend José de Alencar.

[18] Machado had no sympathy towards republicanism,[18] as he considered himself a liberal monarchist[20] and venerated Pedro II, whom he perceived as "a humble, honest, well-learned and patriotic man, who knew how to make of a throne a chair [for his simplicity], without diminishing its greatness and respect.

(1891), Dom Casmurro (1899), Esaú e Jacó (1904) and Memorial de Aires (1908), considered masterpieces,[20] were successes with both critics and the public.

Machado de Assis was included on American literary critic Harold Bloom's list of the greatest 100 geniuses of literature, alongside writers such as Dante, Shakespeare and Cervantes.

Some, such as Abel Barros Baptista, classify Machado as a staunch anti-realist, and argue that his writing attacks Realism, aiming to negate the possibility of representation or the existence of a meaningful objective reality.

Realist critics such as John Gledson are more likely to regard Machado's work as a faithful description of Brazilian reality—but one executed with daring innovative technique.

Historians such as Sidney Chalhoub argue that Machado's prose constitutes an exposé of the social, political and economic dysfunction of late Imperial Brazil.

Roberto Schwarz points out that Machado's innovations in prose narrative are used to expose the hypocrisies, contradictions, and dysfunction of 19th-century Brazil.

Regardless, his incisive prose shines through, able to communicate with readers from different times and places, conveying his ironic and yet tender sense of what we, as human beings, are.

Great 20th-century writers such as Salman Rushdie, Cabrera Infante and Carlos Fuentes, as well as the American film director Woody Allen, have expressed their enthusiasm for his fiction.

[31] Despite the efforts and patronage of such well-known intellectuals as Susan Sontag, Harold Bloom, and Elizabeth Hardwick, Machado's books—the most famous of which are available in English in multiple translations—have never achieved large sales in the English-speaking world and he continues to be relatively unknown, even by comparison with other Latin American writers.