It was first serialized in the newspaper Diário do Rio de Janeiro, but due to its enormous success Alencar decided to compile his writing in a volume.

A plausible explanation for this success might be in the fact that the novel spoke of freedom and independence, arguing for a nativeness that could be found in tropical nature and in the indigenous people of Brazil.

Years later the novel was turned into an opera performed in Italian and called Il Guarany (1870), by Carlos Gomes, among other places it was presented in Milan and New York (it is a known fact[citation needed] that the author did not appreciate the final result).

[1] The Guarani is set back in 1604, a period when Portugal and its colonies submitted to Spanish dominion due to a lack of heirs to ascend to the throne.

[9] The same year the Portuguese illustrator, Jayme Cortez, adapting the novel to the format of comic strips, published in the Diário da Noite.

[17] In the short story "The Last of the Guaranys" by Brazilian writers Octavio Aragão and Carlos Orsi, published in the anthologies The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 3: Portraits of the Trickster (Michael Croteau, ed., Meteor House, 2012) and Tales of the Wold Newton Universe (Win Scott Eckert and Christopher Paul Carey, eds., Titan Books, 2013),[18] Peri is one of the identities adopted by time traveler John Gribardsun (meant to be Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan)[19] in Time's Last Gift, a novel by Philip José Farmer in his Wold Newton family series.