The main hall of the Brazilian Academy of Letters (ABL), in downtown Rio de Janeiro, will hold the wake of Zuenir Ventura on Wednesday (23). The journalist and writer who occupied the academy's chair number 32 died at 95 on Tuesday morning (22), at his home in Rio, of pneumonia. The ABL, whose members are informally known in Brazil as the "immortals", announced the death, which his family also confirmed, according to InfoMoney.

Born on June 1, 1931 in Além Paraíba, in the state of Minas Gerais, Ventura was the son of a painter. He helped his father, worked as an office boy and, still young, won a scholarship in exchange for teaching primary school children. At 20 he moved to Rio and studied neo-Latin literatures at what was then the University of Brazil, today's UFRJ, where he later taught, along with Uerj, the state university of Rio. In journalism from 1956, when he started as an archivist, he held nearly every job in a newsroom: reporter, columnist, editor, head of reporting and news director, with stints at the newspapers O Globo, Correio da Manhã and Jornal do Brasil and the magazines Fatos & Fotos, Cruzeiro, Visão and Veja. For Folha de S.Paulo, he was one of Brazil's greatest journalists, with clear prose devoted to the defense of human rights.

The year that did not end

It was through his books that his name crossed generations. Published in 1988, 1968: O Ano que Não Terminou ("1968: the year that did not end") had reached 48 editions and more than 400,000 copies sold, according to InfoMoney. The book portrays the youth of the 1960s and the resistance to Brazil's military dictatorship, and grew out of a series of 12 reports on the decade that he produced for the publisher Editora Abril at the end of 1969. It inspired the Globo miniseries Os Anos Rebeldes, and one of its chapters, "Um herói solitário", became the film O Homem que Disse Não, made for French television.

Ventura also covered the case of Chico Mendes, the Amazon rubber tappers' leader killed in 1988, in the 1980s, and after the Vigário Geral massacre in the 1990s he spent months following life in that Rio community to write Cidade Partida ("A City Divided"), a work of reportage on urban violence that won him the Jabuti Prize. His books are published today by Companhia das Letras.

Chair 32

Elected in October 2014 to chair number 32, succeeding Ariano Suassuna, Ventura took his seat at the ABL in 2015. He is survived by his wife, Mary Ventura, and their children Elisa and Mauro. He will be buried at the academy's mausoleum at the São João Batista cemetery. Speaking to news outlet g1, journalist Miriam Leitão summed up the loss: "Journalism loses a giant". Columnist Ancelmo Gois added: "He was a master, a friend".

Meanwhile, the academy's hall prepares to receive him one last time. The house where Ventura held for over a decade the chair that once belonged to Suassuna will hold, on Wednesday, the wake of the reporter who turned decades of journalism into some of the most widely read books on Brazil's recent history.