Originally released in 1938, Vidas secas portrays the miserable life of a family of backland retreatants forced to move from time to time to areas less punished by drought. The father, Fabiano, walks through the arid landscape of the caatinga in the northeast of Brazil with his wife, Sinha Vitória, and their two children, who have no names, being called only “older son” and “younger son”. They are also accompanied by the family dog, Baleia, whose name is ironic because the lack of food has made her very thin.

Vidas Secas belongs to the second modernist phase of Brazilian literature, known as the “regionalist” or “novel of the 1930s”. It strongly denounces the ills of the Brazilian people, especially the misery of the northeastern hinterland. It is the novel in which Graciliano achieves the maximum expression that he had been seeking in his prose: what drives the characters is the drought, harsh and cruel, and paradoxically the telluric, affective connection that it exposes in those beings in retreat, looking for means of survival and a future.