It was marketed as "The Lovejoy Mysteries" on VHS in the United States. The DVD release of the entire series has returned to the title of "Lovejoy". Machado de Assis  Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (), often known by his surnames as Machado de Assis, "Machado," or "Bruxo do Cosme Velho" (21 June 1839 – 29 September 1908), was a pioneer Brazilian novelist, poet, playwright and short story writer, widely regarded as the greatest writer of Brazilian literature. Nevertheless, Assis did not achieve widespread popularity outside Brazil during his lifetime. In 1897 he founded and became the first President of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. He was multilingual, having taught himself French, English, German and Greek in later life. Born in Morro do Livramento, Rio de Janeiro, a mulatto from a poor family, he barely studied in public schools and never attended university. He struggled to rise socially, supplying himself with intellectual superiority and cultural capital. To do so, he took several public positions, passing through the Ministry of Agriculture, Trade and Public Works, and achieving early notoriety in newspapers where he published his first poetry and chronicles. Machado's works had a great influence on Brazilian literary schools of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1941, the Brazilian Academy of Letters founded in his honor the Prêmio Machado de Assis (Machado de Assis Award), the most prestigious literary award in the country. For his innovation and audacity in early themes, Assis is often seen as a writer of unprecedented production, known for his irony and wide vocabulary. Assis' greatest works are "Dom Casmurro" (1899), "Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas" ("Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas", also translated as "Epitaph of a Small Winner") and "Quincas Borba" (also known in English as "Philosopher or Dog?"). Machado de Assis was included on American literary critic Harold Bloom's list of the greatest 100 geniuses of literature. Bloom considers him the greatest black writer in Western literature. Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis was born on 21 June 1839 in Rio de Janeiro, then capital of the Empire of Brazil. His parents were Francisco José de Assis, a mulatto wall painter, the son of freed slaves, and Maria Leopoldina da Câmara Machado, an Azorean Portuguese washerwoman.