Pessoa: A Biography

Richard Zenith

This is a sweeping, meticulously researched literary biography of the Portuguese modernist poet Fernando Pessoa, who wrote under dozens of invented alter egos known as heteronyms. Zenith traces Pessoa's life from his childhood in South Africa through his literary career in early twentieth-century Lisbon, drawing on the tens of thousands of manuscript pages Pessoa left behind at his death. The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography and is widely regarded as the definitive account of Pessoa's life and work.