Carpeaux was born Otto Karpfen in 1900 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, to a Jewish

family, and lived there until 1939. At the age of 20, he enrolled at the University
of Vienna to study Law. In 1925, he received a PhD in letters and philosophy and
began working as a journalist. Latter, he also studied exact sciences and
mathematics in Leipzig, sociology and philosophy in Paris, comparative literature
in Naples, and politics in Berlin.[2] At some point in his life, Karpfen converted
to Roman Catholicism, adding Maria to his name and using Fidelis as his surname for
some time. This conversion was evident in his political books (such as Wege Nach
Rom) and his thinking, and led to his participation in the right-wing government of
Engelbert Dollfuss.[3]

When the Anschluss occurred and the Nazis took over Vienna, Carpeaux fled to
Belgium.[4] He stayed there for about a year and, at the break of the Second World
War, he went to Brazil.[5] Carpeaux did not speak Portuguese at first, and he
mastered the language on his own, eventually also frenchifying his lastname to
"Carpeaux", considering that it would seem more prestigious among Brazilian
intellectuals. At first, he was given a simple rural job, but he gradually
established himself as a literary critic. His first published article was on Franz
Kafka, on the newspaper Correio da Manh�, something he did out of desperation when
living under severe conditions. He was to introduce writers such as Robert Musil
and Kafka to Brazilian audiences, along with the literary criticism of Wilhelm
Dilthey, Benedetto Croce, Walter Benjamin and others.

His first book in Portuguese came in 1942, A Cinza do Purgat�rio. Two years later,
he became director of Funda��o Get�lio Vargas library. He also published essays on
philosophers and sociologists such as Friedrich Engels and Max Weber, as well as on
Brazilian writers he came to discover when in the country, writing on Carlos
Drummond de Andrade e Graciliano Ramos.

Perhaps the peak of Carpeaux's production was his eight-volume Hist�ria da

Literatura Ocidental (History of Western Literature),[6] available only in
Portuguese, in spite of being in public domain. Carpeaux took eight years to write
his masterwork, from 1941 to 1947. Late critic Jos� Lino Gr�newald labelled it one
of the brightest moments of the language in prose, despite the fact that Carpeaux
was not a native speaker. It is also unique in that it focuses on creating links
between all periods, in order to create an organic vision of the literary history
he is telling. The book also include more than 8,000 brief criticisms and
expositions of the majority of the figures discussed along the way, minus the ones
cited in passing; all are dealt with in their original languages, both in
expositions and quotations and in the bibliography offered. The total
bibliographical amount of cited works is on the merge of 30,000 books or more.

In this series, Carpeaux begins with an analysis of classical Greek and Latin
literatures and proceeds until the twentieth century avant-garde movements such as
surrealism and dadaism, encompassing every major literary establishments in
between. For this reason, it has been called "definitive, encyclopaedic and
multidisciplinary, a fundamental work in Brazilian literary and cultural
bibliography".[7] To Antonio Candido, Carpeaux's "universal vision allows him to
surmount the eventual limitations of critic nacionalism, whose historic function is
important in certain moments, but which must not serve to obliterate the true
dimension of the literary phenomena, which, through its own nature, is
transcendental as well as national. Carpeaux demonstrates in other moments how
Brazilian literature benefits from being seen in a double perspective, such as his,
capable of increasing insight and break routine."[8]

Never abandoning his abomination to militarism and tyranny, Carpeaux opposed to the
Brazilian Military Regime and abandoned his literary writings by 1968, in order to
participate more actively on political debate. However, he did participate in the
composition of an encyclopedia called Mirador. He maintained his convictions as a
right-wing thinker, and died of a heart attack in 1978.

Recently, his essays have been compiled by Brazilian philosopher Olavo de Carvalho,
[9] with an added introduction. Critic Mauro Souza Ventura released De Karpfen a
Carpeaux, a study in the life and work of Carpeaux. Carpeaux's other works include
a dense history of German literature, several books of literary criticism, a
popular history of Western music and various political writings.