Rubem Alves was born on September 15, 1933 in Boa Esperança, when the city was still called Dores da Boa Esperança, in Minas Gerais. After high school, he studied theology at Seminário Presbiteriano do Sul. After graduating, he returned to his home state to serve as pastor amid the simple and poor people.

After a period of study in New York, he returned to Brazil after the military coup in 1964 and was denounced as subversive by the Presbyterian Church. To escape those who were persecuting him, he returned to the United States with his family. There, at the invitation of the United Presbyterian Church - USA and the president of Princeton Theological Seminary, he wrote his doctoral thesis entitled "Towards a Theology of Liberation".

He returned to Brazil with a Ph.D, broke with the Presbyterian Church, and became unemployed. He went to work teaching in higher education at the Faculdade de Filosofia Ciências e Letras in Rio Claro, and, starting in 1974, was a professor at Unicamp until his retirement.

In 1959, he married Lídia Nopper and they had two sons and a daughter together. Thanks to the girl, he began writing stories for children. He devoted himself to literature and poetry, understanding that both were food for the body and pleasing to the soul. Writing fulfilled his frustrated dream of being a pianist. He channeled into words the gift he lacked for musical notes. Inspired by Albert Camus, Nietzsche, Jorge Luis Borges, Roland Barthes, Fernando Pessoa and Manoel de Barros, among many others, he became one of the most prolific and beloved Brazilian writers.

His opus includes more than a hundred books, divided among children’s books, chronicles, education, religion, theology and even biography, and the book “O velho que acordou menino” (2005), which narrates memories of his childhood.

In the 1980’s, he became a psychoanalyst, calling himself heterodox since he believed that beauty inhabited the depths of the unconscious. He had his own clinic until 2004 and drew inspiration from his patients for many of his chronicles. In a statement published on Rubem Alves’ web site, Leonardo Boff said his friend "became a master with original points of view on many different subjects. He can speak poetically about the prosaic and prosaically about poetry. In my opinion, he is one of those who has the best command of the Portuguese language in our generation, with an elegance and lightness of style that truly fascinates us."

_{Adapted from http://iglesiadescalza.blogspot.com.br/2014/07/writer-and-theologian-rubem-alves-dies.html, May 2015}

In the sentence “Writing fulfilled his frustrated dream of being a pianist”, what does the verb “fulfill” mean?