Bidspirit auction | GOMES (Soeiro Pereira). ESTEIROS. Lisboa.

GOMES (Soeiro Pereira). ESTEIROS. Lisboa. 1941. - GOMES (Soeiro Pereira) ESTEIROS . Capa e desenhos de Álvaro Cunhal. Lisboa: Edições Sirius, 1941. 298-[6] pp.: il.; 195 mm. First edition, with cover and illustrations by Álvaro Cunhal. Esteiros is one of the founding works of Portuguese literary neo-realism, a movement that had been officially inaugurated two years earlier with Alves Redol's Gaibéus . The novel narrates the lives of children who worked in the tile kilns on the banks of the Tagus River – the ”esteiros” of the title – in a context of misery and exploitation of child labor, which the dedication captures in the lapidary formula ”the children of men who were never children”. The cover of the first edition, signed by Álvaro Cunhal – then a young communist militant before becoming the historical leader of the PCP – gives the copy added documentary interest. The censorship of the Estado Novo regime did not notice the work in its first circulation; only in 1966, when it reached its fifth edition, was the novel subject to censorship, too late to stop its impact. Rare and highly sought after in this first edition. ⚑ Auto-translated via Google Translate