RIO DE JANEIRO -- Brazil's northeastern state of Bahia paid homage Tuesday to Jorge Amado, the writer whose novels celebrated its people, history and culture, AFP reported.

Amado, author of "Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands," died late Monday of heart failure in the state capital of Salvador, four days shy of his 89th birthday.

Amado's body was brought to the state government house for a public viewing Tuesday, and then was to be cremated as he had requested, his family said. The writer's ashes were to be scattered underneath a mango tree in the garden of the family home in the Rio Vermelho neighborhood.

"Brazil lost one of its greatest artists," President Fernando Henrique Cardoso said on national television. "His legacy trascends his work, which is rich, deep and the living example of what the human spirit can achieve in its highest endeavour."

For all Brazilians, Cardoso added, Amado left behind "the lesson of a fighter; of somebody who was always on the side of justice and stood by the oppressed."

Singer Caetano Veloso interrupted his concert late Monday in Salvador when informed of Amado's death, before offering a song in his honor.

"I dedicate the song Leaozinho' (little lion) to the great citizen of Bahia who has fallen," Veloso said.

The ailing Amado was rushed to a hospital late Monday, where he suffered a fatal heart attack.

He had not appeared in public for several months because of his chronic cardiac problems.

He had earlier lost 80 percent of his eyesight, a complication from diabetes, suffered a previous heart attack in 1993 and was fitted with a pacemaker in 1996. His health troubles in recent months forced him to enter hospital in June for a diabetic crisis and again in July for hypoglycemia.

His wife, 84-year-old Zelia Gattai, said her husband had hoped he would recover in time to celebrate his 89th birthday Friday.

The Couple Has Two Children.

Arguably Brazil's best-known writer of the 20th century, Amado wrote more than 40 novels, which have been translated into 54 languages.

Known as "the emperor of Salvador," Amado was an engaging writer who has a wide-ranging and colorful literary heritage, revolving mostly around topics including love for life and political engagement. Salvador's streets and the dusty backroads of Bahia's interior were his favorite settings.

His first works, marked by his Marxist ideology, gave way to books full of tenderness and humor, wherein live "battling men and women, who are poor without being sad, exploited without having been beaten."

Born in 1912 to a cocoa farmer in Ferradas, a town in southern Bahia State, Amado began work as a journalist at the age of 14.

While studying law, he wrote his first novel, "The Country of the Carnival" at the age of 19.

In 1931, he began his affiliation with the Communist Party, which included a stint in the 1946 constituent assembly as a federal deputy for the Communist Party of Brazil.

A fervent Stalinist, amado was imprisoned several times, beginning in 1935, for his leftist activities.

He has also been accused by some of having been a Nazi collaborator, dubbed Brazil's "Dr Faustus" by Brazilian literature professor Janer Cristaldo.

Periodically exiled from Brazil, he became an international literary hero and was awarded France's Legion of Honor in 1984.

His most popular book, "Dona Flor," was also made into a 1977 movie starring Sonia Braga as the title character, a cooking instructor caught between a roguish ghost of a dead husband and her successful second spouse.

Amado, in referring to his body of work once remarked: "What was I but a novelist of whores and vagrants? If some beauty exists in what I wrote, it comes from the dispossessed, of the branded women who live on the edge of death."