Carolina Maria de Jesus, a black woman with African hair, was born in 1914, in the city of Sacramento, in Minas Gerais. She moved to São Paulo, where she worked as a maid and paper collector to support herself and her three children, whom she raised alone. Carolina wrote about her daily life in the Canindé favela, North Zone of São Paulo, until, in 1958, she met journalist Audálio Dantas, who helped her publish her diaries.

His first book, Quarto de Despejo, published in 1960, sold ten thousand copies in four days and 100 thousand copies in one year. This book recounts his experiences in the favela, about how he survived hunger with his children. To this day, it is a current account of the living conditions of many other women in Brazil's favelas.

Carolina attended school until the second year of elementary school, where she learned to write and read. However, coming from a very humble and non-literate family, there were no books in her house that the future writer could read. Very e