From reading the texts of the prefacitors of the full works (1956) by Afonso Henriques de Lima Barreto (Lima Barreto or LB), his biography written by Francisco de Assis Barbosa (of 1952) and some of his writings, there is a discussion of the writer’s work in Brazilian literature. Never adapted to the literary canone of its time and local, socially marginalised, alcohol-listed and twice admitted to a psychiatric hospital, the literary images of Brazil built by the writer in his crone, intimate and novels, and in their relationship with the Brazilian confluent modernity, extrapolate the nuances of his common life exposed as a background and give rise to one of the richest literary and critical works in the history of Brazilian society at that time.