Clarice Lispector (December 10, 1920 - December 9, 1977) was a Brazilian writer acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, as an infant she moved to Brazil with her family, amidst the disasters engulfing her native land following the First World War. She grew up in Recife, the capital of the northeastern state of Pernambuco, where her mother died when she was nine. The family moved to Rio de Janeiro when she was in her teens.
In December 1943, she published her first novel, Perto do coracao selvagem (Near to the Wild Heart). The novel, which tells of the inner life of a young woman named Joana, caused a sensation. In October 1944, the book won the prestigious Graca Aranha Prize for the best debut novel of 1943. One critic, the poet Ledo Ivo, called it "the greatest novel a woman has ever written in the Portuguese language." Another wrote that Clarice had "shifted the center of gravity around which the Brazilian novel had been revolving for about twenty years". "Clarice Lispector's work appears in our literary world as the most serious attempt at the introspective novel," wrote the Sao Paulo critic Sergio Milliet. "For the first time, a Brazilian author goes beyond simple approximation in this almost virgin field of our literature; for the first time, an author penetrates the depths of the psychological complexity of the modern soul." This novel, like all of her subsequent works, was marked by an intense focus on interior emotional states. When the novel was published, many claimed that her stream-of-consciousness writing style was heavily influenced by Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, but she only read these authors after the book was ready. The epigraph from Joyce and the title, which is taken from Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, were both suggested by Lucio Cardoso. Shortly afterwards, Clarice and Maury Gurgel left Rio for the northern city of Belem, in the state of Para, at the mouth of the Amazon. There, Maury served as a liaison between the Foreign Ministry and the international visitors who were using northern Brazil as a military base in World War II.
What is  Near to the Wild Heart?
her first novel, Perto do coracao selvagem In December 1943, she published her first novel, Perto do coracao selvagem (Near to the Wild Heart). In December 1943, she published her first novel, Perto do coracao selvagem (Near to the Wild Heart). her first novel, Perto do coracao selvagem (Near to the Wild Heart).
her first novel, Perto do coracao selvagem (Near to the Wild Heart).