For decades there has been controversy regarding the author’s date and place of birth. The author himself claimed publicly to have been born in Rio de Janeiro in 1897, although official birth records seem to indicate that he and his twin brother (who died in infancy) were born in Ilha Terceira, in the Portuguese Azores Islands, in 1896. Regardless of the controversy, Vieira is regarded as a Brazilian author. He was adopted and raised by his mother’s brother, who gave him the name Vieira, after his parents died when he was ten years old. He lived in Brazil for most of his life, although he attended high school in Paris, at the famed Lycée Condorcet, and returned to Europe after medical school in Brazil to acquire specialized training in the then-new field of radiology, a profession which he practiced for a number of years before giving it up to pursue writing full time.

Vieira is the author of fifteen works, including novels, a book-length poem, short stories, a memoir, and a volume of his art criticism. Acclaimed during his lifetime for his poetic style and ability to delve into the complexities of the human soul, Vieira was overshadowed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries by more popular Brazilian writers. Since 2020, however, Vieira’s works have undergone something of a renaissance, with four of his major titles reissued in Portuguese by the São Paulo publishing house CEDET. In addition to The Slope of Memory, two other titles, The Woman Who Escaped from Sodom, and The Fortieth Door, will be out in English translations soon.

In addition to his work as an author and critic, Vieira translated the works of numerous European and American authors into Portuguese, including the first-ever Portuguese rendition of Jame’s Joyce’s classic A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Vieira also translated works by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Stendahl, Mauriac, Hemingway, Twain, Merton and others, more than sixty titles over a twenty-seven-year period.