In the dozen years Carolina Maria de Jesus (1914-1977) lived in a Sao Paulo, Brazil, shanty slum, she survived by rummaging for junk. She also kept a diary of her abject poverty. Black, illegitimate, and poor, she suddenly became at age forty-six Brazil's best-selling author when a book drawn from her diaries appeared in 1960. An English translation, Child of the Dark, was published in 1962 and sold over 300,000 paperback copies in the United States in a decade. Newsweek heralded her book "a desperate, terrifying outcry from the slums of Sao Paulo ... one of the most astonishing documents of the lower depths ever printed." Robert Levine assigned Child of the Dark in his classes for nearly thirty years, and frequently students asked what became of Carolina. This book provides startling answers to that recurring question.