Portrait of Zélia Gattai

Birthday profile

Zélia Gattai

Zélia Gattai, Brazilian author and photographer (died 2008)

Born
July 2, 1916
Died
May 17, 2008
Zodiac sign
Cancer
Birth year
1916

About Zélia Gattai

Zélia Gattai Amado de Faria (July 2, 1916 – May 17, 2008) was a Brazilian photographer, memoirist, novelist and author of children's literature, as well as a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. Gattai wrote 14 literary works, including children's books, and her own personal memoirs have been widely published. == Biography == Zélia Gattai was born in São Paulo city in the neighborhood of Paraíso, state of São Paulo, on July 2, 1916, to a family of Italian immigrants. Gattai's father, Ernesto Gattai, was an anarchist and came from the region of Veneto, following the social anarchist experiment called Colônia Cecília that sought to create an anarchist community in the Brazilian jungle. Her father was arrested in 1938 due to political oppression under the Vargas Estado Novo regime. Gattai lived in Paraíso, São Paulo for her entire adolescence. In the 1930s, Zélia Gattai entered the intellectual and social circles of the modernists of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, becoming a friend of personalities such as Oswald de Andrade, Lasar Segall, Tarsila do Amaral, Mário de Andrade, Rubem Braga, Zora Seljan, Paulo Mendes de Almeida, Carlos Lacerda, Aldo Bonadei, Vinícius de Moraes and others. At the age of 20, Zélia Gattai married Communist militant Aldo Veiga and had her first child, Luís Carlos Veiga, with him. Their marriage ended after eight years and Gattai ended up falling in love with writer and communist Jorge Amado. The new couple decided to live together in 1945 and had their first child together, João Jorge Amado, in 1946.

Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.

Career and life highlights

Zélia Gattai timeline

  1. The family spent the first part of the five-year exile in Paris where Gattai used the opportunity to get a degree in French Civilization, Phonetics, and Language at the university of Sorbonne in 1949.
  2. This memoir quickly became a bestseller and it was dramatized as a miniseries directed by Walter Avancini and created by the Globo Television Network in 1984 which allowed it to capture a large audience.

The world when Zélia Gattai was born

Zélia Gattai was born in 1916. The year snapshot below places that birthday in its cultural and historical setting: the music and films people were following, the headlines shaping public life, and the everyday prices families encountered.

Culture in 1916

  • Best-selling book"Seventeen" – Booth Tarkington

Headlines and milestones

  • Major sports momentGeorgia Tech defeats Cumberland 222-0, most lopsided football game ever
  • Top headlineBattle of the Somme — 1 million casualties
  • Technology milestoneTanks first used in warfare
  • Notable inventionMilitary tanks
  • World population~1.76B

United States snapshot

  • U.S. leaderWoodrow Wilson
  • U.S. population99.6M

1916 versus 2026

These figures put everyday life in Zélia Gattai's birth year beside the site's latest United States snapshot.

Measure19162026
Population99.6M341 million

Sources and editorial standards

This profile combines a biographical source with structured birthday and historical context. Sources recorded for this profile: Wikipedia, Library of Congress, Wikidata. See our editorial policy for sourcing, corrections, and review standards.

Read the source biography on Wikipedia. Wikipedia text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.