title: Captains of the Sands (Penguin Classics)
author:  Jorge Amado 
description: Amado was writing to save his countrys soul. . . . The scenes where the captains of the sands manage to fool the rich of the city and get away with it would have made Henry Fielding or Charles Dickens proud. <b>Colm Tibn</b>, from the Introduction<br /><br />"Amado is Brazil's most illustrious and venerable novelist."<b><i>The New York Times</i></b><br /><br />Brazils leading man of letters . . . Amado is adored around the world! <b><i>Newsweek</i></b><br />
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  ![Cover image for Captains of the Sands](../images/cover.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  PENGUIN ![](../images/peng.png) CLASSICS
  
  
  CAPTAINS OF THE SANDS
  
  
  JORGE AMADO (1912–2001), the son of a cocoa planter, was born in the Brazilian
  state of Bahia, which he would portray in more than thirty novels. His first
  novels, published when he was still a teenager, dramatize the class struggles
  of workers on Bahian cocoa plantations. Amado was later exiled for his leftist
  politics, but his novels would always have a strong political perspective. Not
  until Amado returned to Brazil in the 1950s did he write his acclaimed novels
  _Gabriela_ , _Clove and Cinnamon_ , and _Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands_ (the
  basis for the successful film and Broadway musical of the same name), which
  display a lighter, more comic approach than his overtly political novels. One
  of the most renowned writers of the Latin American boom of the 1960s, Amado
  has had his work translated into more than forty-five languages.
  
  
  GREGORY RABASSA is