In 1943, he helped usher in a new era in Brazilian theater with his play Vestido de Noiva (The Wedding Dress), considered revolutionary for the complex exploration of its characters' psychology and its use of colloquial dialogue.

In 1929, older brother Roberto, a talented graphic artist, was shot and killed at the newspaper offices by a society lady who objected to the salacious coverage of her divorce, allegedly involving an adulterous affair with a local doctor.

It began a fruitful collaboration with Polish émigré director Zbigniew Ziembinski, who is reported to have said on reading The Wedding Dress, "I am unaware of anything in world theater today that resembles this."

Rodrigues suspected the two girls weren't his but believed the boy was his son, even dedicating his column on Ultima Hora newspaper to Paulo on the day of his birth.

The latter plays, which include some of his later and best-known productions, are mostly tragicomedies where Rodrigues explored the lives of Rio’s lower-middle class, a population never deemed worthy of the stage before him.

In the play — which takes place in a semi-mythical setting, which is never identified [4]— a successful black doctor marries a white woman and their marriage cannot help but reflect the dysfunctional race relations of society at large.

In the play, men are completely absent, except for a pair of boots on stage meant to represent the fiancé of the daughter of one of the widows, Das Dores, who is actually the ghost of a stillborn child.

In the 1950s, Rodrigues began publishing daily short stories as part of highly successful column A Vida Como Ela É (Life As It Is).

His fanciful columns on soccer, where he melded scant commentary on the games' happenings with his literary obsessions and stock phrases, are said by Alex Bellos to take have taken football-writing "into a new dimension".

[15] According to the critic Paulo Francis Rodrigues' constant subject-matter was simple: "human beings are prisoners of irresistible passions, taken as shameful by society [...] and usually punished [...] Nelson was a moral conservative, with a talent for depicting emotions below the waist".

[16] From the very start of his playwright career, Rodrigues' was labeled by conservative critics as a "pervert" for his nearly obsessive exploration of sexual taboos (adultery, homosexuality, incest) in his plays, novels and columns.

[18] During the 1960s, Rodrigues was to write that giving room for the young to offer opinion was to turn society upside down, and that Betty Friedan should be locked in a mental institution.

[19] It was exactly this implicit awareness of the immorality of existing social relations - the portrayal of the family as both sacred and failed[20] - that didn't endear Nelson Rodrigues to fellow conservatives: after reading Album de Família, his close friend, the poet Manuel Bandeira, offered him the advice to try his hand at writing about "normal people".

[23] During the military dictatorship, Rodrigues' 1966 novel O Casamento, about a middle-aged businessman who gradually realizes his incestuous love towards his daughter on the eve of her wedding, was withdrawn from circulation by government censorship for alleged indecency.

As a playwright, Rodrigues is frequently considered a realist, mostly on account of the self-acknowledged influence exerted on him by the dramatic work of Eugene O'Neill[24] - specially in his earlier, "mythical" plays.

[25] Actually, in terms of style, Rodrigues' work is a kind of belatedly Expressionism, combining an appearance of empirical reality (the accurate portrayal of small everyday happenings and the use of the contemporary Brazilian vernacular) surrounding a kernel of mythologized, intense and unrealistic - to the point of "cartoonish absurdity"[26] - psychological dramatic action.

[27] In it, the viewpoint is always that of the small man who acts as the writer's alter ego, with his "obtuse, fanatic, delirious obsessions"[28] - the small man of the 1950s Rio de Janeiro lower middle-class,who, as Rodrigues himself, had "a single suit, a single pair of shoes",[29] and was torn between the longing for a lost moral order - specially, when a male, to the threat posed to his authority by the incipient female emancipation fostered by the development of an urban milieu and its possibilities of unwitnessed encounters[30] and his (or hers) sexual drives.In short, his work displays a "violent prejudiced patriarchal society" confronted to "all manner of sexual repression, perversions and taboos".

[33] However, in 1962, Rodrigues' 1958 play Boca de Ouro (The Golden Mouth) - the tragedy of a mobster of the illegal Brazilian animal lottery (jogo do bicho) known for his set of gold false teeth, hence the title - was to be adapted to the screen by leftist director Nelson Pereira dos Santos, who tried to meld Rodrigues' moralizing streak with Brechtian social drama and American mob film.

[34] A fervent, spontaneous anticommunist already before the military coup d'etat of 1964, Rodrigues was generally regarded as apolitical before the dictatorship, during which he was to engage in constant clashes and running feuds with the Left.

During much of the 1960s and early 1970s, he included incendiary attacks in his newspaper column against various opponents of the dictatorship—a list that ranged from leaders of leftist movements and guerrilla organizations to the bishop of Olinda Helder Câmara and the Catholic literary critic Alceu Amoroso Lima, eventually leading charges of being an apologist for the dictatorship.

One of his collections of articles - where he offered, in an almost daily basis, an exquisite mix of adulation for the dictatorship[35] and denunciation of allegedly communist plots [36]-he proudly titled O Reacionário (The Reactionary).

In 1968, he participated in an anti-censorship rally to protest the closing of eight plays by the military censors, and signed a petition that formally requested that such censorship be rescinded.