Octávio Tarquínio de Sousa

The son of Bráulio Tarquínio de Sousa Amaranto and Joana Oliveira de Sousa, Tarquínio was born in Rio de Janeiro on 7 September 1889. He finished his secondary studies and joined the Faculty of Legal and Social Sciences of Rio de Janeiro, where he graduated with a law degree in 1907, beginning his career in the Postal Office administration and later joining the Postal Service of Rio de Janeiro from 1914 to 1918.^[1][2]

In 1918 he became the general attorney of the Federal Court of Audits. In 1924 he was the Brazilian representative to the International Conference on Emigration and Immigration held in Rome. In 1932 he became one of the court's ministers, retiring in 1946.^[1][2][3]

Tarquínio began his career as a writer in 1914, when he published the work Monólogo das Coisas, a collection of short stories with some of his personal memoirs, and began to actively collaborate with the journal O Estado de S. Paulo from 1916 to 1917. In 1928 he published a translation to Portuguese of Omar Khayam's Rubaiyat, also acting as a literary critic.^[1][2]

Together with important Brazilian intellectuals who emerged in the 1930s, such as Gilberto Freyre, Caio Prado Júnior and Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Tarquínio elaborated studies on Brazilian history, bringing new concepts to historiography and writing biographies about important historical Brazilian figures such as Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos, Evaristo da Veiga, Diogo Antônio Feijó, José Bonifácio and Pedro I. The biographies were written from 1937 to 1952 and later compiled in a single work: História dos Fundadores do Império do Brasil (History of the Founders of the Empire of Brazil), in 1957, becoming his most notable work.^[4][5]

Tarquínio died in a plane crash in Rio de Janeiro on 22 December 1959, together with his wife Lucia Miguel Pereira (b. 1904).^[1]

• Gonçalves, Márcia de Almeida (2004). "Narrativa biográfica e escrita da história: Octávio Tarquínio de Sousa e seu tempo". Revista de História (in Portuguese) (150): 129–155. doi:10.11606/issn.2316-9141.v0i150p129-155.
• Pimenta, João Paulo. "Sousa, Octavio Tarquínio de (Rio de Janeiro, 1889–1959)" (PDF). Dicionário de Historiadores Portugueses (in Portuguese).
• Rodrigues, José Honório (1960). "Octavio Tarquinio de Sousa (1889–1959)". The Hispanic American Historical Review (in Portuguese). 40 (3). Duke University Press: 431–434. doi:10.1215/00182168-40.3.431. JSTOR 2509958.