Alfredo d'Escragnolle Taunay (1843 - 1899)

Alfredo Maria Adriano d'Escragnolle Taunay, Viscount of Taunay (February 22, 1843 – January 25, 1899), was a French Brazilian writer, musician, professor, military engineer, historian, politician, sociologist and nobleman. He is famous for the Regionalist novel Inocência, considered a major forerunner of Naturalism in Brazil, and for A Retirada da Laguna (1874; originally written in 1872 in French as Le retraite de Laguna), an account of an episode in the war against Paraguay. The Brazilianist Leslie Bethell has described it as "the one undoubted literary masterpiece produced by the Paraguayan War". He founded and occupied the 13th chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters from 1897 until his death in 1899.