"Written between 1955 and 1960, Child of the Dark is the daily journal of an artist, a writer who, as the single mother of three young children, supports her family by picking through garbage for paper and scraps to sell. They live in a cardboard and wood-scrap shack in a Brazilian slum called the favelas, where there is no plumbing, and one public cold-water spigot is the only clean water source for several hundred people. Her journal documents the lives favelados are forced to live....Carolina de Jesus is a poet of intense dignity."--500 Great Books by Women

"A haunting chronicle...a dramatic document of the dispossessed that both shocks and moves the reader."--New York Herald Tribune

"It is a minor classic--because it is one of the very few books that have ever been written about the lowest and the poorest, les mis rables, by one of themselves."--Horizon

"It is both an ugly book and a touchingly beautiful book. It carries protest and it carries compassion. There is even bitter humor. As a fast-paced and strangely observant account of sheer misery, Child of the Dark is an immensely disturbing study of what can happen to a segment of the population of one of the world's potentially wealthiest nations...a rarely matched essay on the meaning and feeling of hunger, degradation, and want."--The New York Times Book Review

Carolina Maria de Jesus (1914-1977) lived in a São Paulo, Brazil, shanty slum. She also kept a diary of her abject poverty. Black, illegitimate, and poor, she suddenly became at age forty-six Brazil's best-selling author when a book drawn from her diaries appeared in 1960. An English translation, Child of the Dark, was published in 1962 and sold over 300,000 copies in the United States in a decade. Newsweek heralded her book as "a desperate, terrifying outcry from the slums of São Paulo . . . one of the most astonishing documents of the lower depths ever printed."