He acted mostly as an advocate of modernism in cultural matters, later becoming embroiled in Brazil's 1960s political struggles as a Trotskyist sympathizer and a left-wing nationalist, while at the same time keeping a distance from both Stalinism and Latin American populism.

[citation needed] Born as Franz Paul Trannin da Matta Heilborn into a middle-class family of German descent,[1] Francis received his early education in various traditional Catholic schools in Rio de Janeiro.

Although he received an award as a rising star in 1952, he did not pursue the career: according to Kucisnki, because he lacked talent;[4] according to his former mentor Paschoal Carlos Magno, because his interests were directed firstly towards political activism.

As a scholar, he was prone to what many saw as excessive intellectual pretensions: in the words of one of his critics, psychoanalyst and writer Maria Rita Kehl, Francis never doubted, as he had supposedly understood everything even before realizing what actually happened.

These same critics saw in it a signal of an inability to perform sustained intellectual work and a tendency to rely on flashes of wit and borrowed erudition (the use of incessant quotes and bon mots) something that would make him prone to mistakes and imprecision.

[20] Within this intellectual framework, Francis acted as a cultural nationalist, supporting contemporary rising Brazilian playwrights such as Nelson Rodrigues and Gianfrancesco Guarnieri and actors such as Fernanda Montenegro and was generally respected for doing so.

[29] In his articles, he advocated for a nationalist Left-reformist agenda (land and franchise reforms and the strengthening of foreign investment controls), advising the Left to support the João Goulart government by means of a strategy of pressure "from below", banking on the grassroots mobilization of the broad masses against what he saw as a mostly reactionary Parliament.

Evading censorship, he wrote mostly about international affairs, and manifestly opposed US intervention in Vietnam, as well as supporting the PLO, flouting the official pro-American and pro-Israel sympathies of the military government in texts considered so uncharacteristically sober that they later produced a remark from Kucinski that "only then he became a real mentsch".

[45] After 1976, Francis was employed again by a major Brazilian paper, as he began working exclusively for daily Folha de S.Paulo, then under the editorship of the Trotskyist cadre and famed editor Cláudio Abramo.

[47] In his view, what the modernist writer should strive at was historical relevance, by depicting in personal terms the fragmentary character of the social reality around him, described through the objective sensation felt, shunning any kind of commentary wont at offering a sense of coherence and totality.

[51] Basing himself on these rules, during the late 1970s, Francis would publish the first two parts of an intended trilogy of social novels in which he tried, in a style Francis himself declares as reminiscent of James Joyce, but has very little in common to the style and genius of the Irish artist, to shun what he saw as the populist streak of Brazilian modern fiction,[52] that is, the portrayal of the lives of the rural lower and/or higher classes typical of later Brazilian modernist authors such as Érico Veríssimo, Jorge Amado or Graciliano Ramos.

By the same token, he associated his embrace of modernist stylish conventions (juxtaposition, non-linear narration) – or, in his own words, the deliberate refusal of earlier formal stylistics[56] – to the necessity of portraying an emerging urban Brazil.

In 1979, he published a sequel, Cabeça de Negro (also a pun, this time with the name of a kind of homemade firework called "black man's head"), which was intended both as a thriller and as one of the various 1970s memorial novels that chronicled the armed underground struggle against the Brazilian military dictatorship.

[60] According to the prominent Austro-Brazilian critic Otto Maria Carpeaux, what Francis' novels offered was information "about a fringe of Brazilian society that snorts lines and stays drunk" and "an out of focus look at a seaside [i.e. fashionable] swathe of our age".

[65] This alleged self-centered character of his fictions made literary critic João Luiz Lafetá declare that Francis had intended to write about the anatomy of the Brazilian ruling class but had written only about his (dependent) position towards it as an intellectual.

[66] In a late, posthumous comment on the twin "Cabeça" novels, the writer Ricardo Lisias wrote that Francis' text was a mix of superficial geopolitics, culinary frivolity, creepy sexual commentaries - all spun together in "a kind of crazed speech, always in the same whirling, meaningless rhythm".

[67] However, what these same critics acknowledged as the greatest achievement of the two novels was Francis's "stylistics of mockery" (retórica da esculhambação): his grammatically incorrect phrasing, polyglot vocabulary[68] and confused mix between the erudite and the downright vulgar.

[70] Such was an outward manifestation of a deeper process that affected Francis as well as other Brazilian Left intellectuals of the time: a general feeling of disenchantment that eventually found a solution in the most extreme aggression directed toward earlier ideals.

[74] In 1980, Francis published a mostly political memoir upon turning 50, O afeto que se encerra ("The love enclosed" – a pun again, this time on a verse from the Brazilian Flag Anthem), in which he confirmed his Marxist beliefs.

[92] In the late 1980s, however, he would develop suspicions regarding what he saw as the PT's increasing radicalism,[93] which, associated to his usual misanthropy ("by my aristocratic calling I mean setting strict bounds to sympathies for my neighbors"),[94] led him eventually to express a fear that the emergence of a grassroots, mass, trade-union-based and anti-intellectual Left, such as that which the Workers' Party represented, meant the risk that Brazil and the Brazilians could distance themselves from "our cultural heritage [sic] which is the Illuminist West, the USA, our North American peers in size, which since Franklin Roosevelt want us to be their South American partners".

[97] In a later commentary, he would reject even the mere idea of actual mass politics and write disparagingly about 1960s New Left protest culture: even when there are rallies and marches, "if you look closer, it's the usual suspects who make noises.

[99] Such an a priori rejection, as it was, needed not be very elaborate: in a 1994 interview, Francis offered as a reason for his shift a 1970s trip to the American Midwest, "the industrial center of the country" where he allegedly had seen "nothing to equal it, in the way of progress and workers' welfare".

[104] In his last book, Trinta Anos Esta Noite (1994), a memoir published on the 30th anniversary of the 1964 coup, he would argue that a socialist transformation of Brazilian society at the time was not achievable, and that Brazil should develop into the American sphere of influence.

[110] This kind of abuse eventually procured Francis a doubtful fame, built around his various scandalous smears, such as when he expressed his desire to have the PT MP-cum-unionist, the Afro-Brazilian Vicentinho, "whipped as a slave".

Ignorant generations of the glory of the Western culture, of Homer, Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Voltaire, Molière, Jean Racine, Michelangelo, Benvenuto Cellini, were formed in these twenty years without knowledge of these people.

[115][116] From 1979 on, he worked as a TV commentator for Rede Globo—something that was in itself a telling proof of his political shift, as he had, during the dictatorship, charged the Globo boss Roberto Marinho with manipulating information in order to have him banished from Brazil.

[117] He also sustained a heated dispute with the newspaper ombudsman of Folha de S.Paulo Caio Túlio Costa—mostly over Francis' repeated insulting of Lula as the PT's presidential candidate for the incoming 1989 elections.

[130] In early 1996, he was attacked bitterly by the anthropologist and then senator Darcy Ribeiro, who, reacting to Francis' disparaging comments on a bill he had presented on the restructuring of Brazil's education system, called him a neogringo and charged him with lobbying for private universities' interests.

[130] The libel suit seems to have added to Francis' poor health condition, which was also due to a lifelong lack of physical exercise, heavy drinking and drug addiction, and chronic depression.

He was buried in Rio de Janeiro, and was survived by his wife Sonia Nolasco,[134] who at the time was already working for the United Nations Organization and after her husband's death would perform various humanitarian missions to East Timor and Haiti.