Writer, essayist, and journalist, born in Santiago de las Vegas, N Cuba, of Italian parents. He spent his early years in San Remo, and studied at Turin, where he worked as a publisher. His first novel, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (1947, The Path to the Nest of Spiders), described resistance against Fascism in a highly naturalistic manner. In later works, such as I nostri antenati (1960, Our Ancestors), he adopted a more condensed style of story-telling, hovering between allegory and pure fantasy, while Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore (1979, If On a Winter's Night a Traveller) tests the limits of experiment in fiction.
Italo Calvino (October 15, 1923 – September 19, 1985) (pronounced [ˈiː.ta.lo kalˈviː.no]) was an Italian writer and novelist.
Biography
Born in Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba, to botanists Mario Calvino and Evelina Mameli (a descendant of Goffredo Mameli) and brother of Floriano Calvino, a famous geologist, Italo Calvino soon moved to his family's homeland of Italy, where he lived most of his life.
He stayed in Sanremo, on the Italian Riviera, for some 20 years and enrolled in the Avanguardisti (a fascist youth organisation of which membership was practically compulsory) with whom he took part in the occupation of the French Riviera.
In 1941 he moved to Turin, after a long hesitation over living in this town or Milan.
In 1943, he joined the Partisans in the Italian Resistance, in the Garibaldi brigade, with the battlename of Santiago, and with Scalfari he created the MUL (liberal universitarian movement).
In 1947, Calvino graduated from Turin's university with a thesis on Joseph Conrad and started working with the official Communist paper L'Unità; With Vittorini he wrote for the weekly Il Politecnico (a cultural magazine associated with the university).
He worked again for the Einaudi house from 1950, as responsible for the literary volumes.
In 1952 Calvino wrote with Giorgio Bassani for Botteghe Oscure, a magazine named after the popular name of the party's head-offices, and worked for Il Contemporaneo, a Marxist weekly.
In 1957 Calvino unexpectedly left the Communist party, and his letter of resignation (soon famous) was published in L'Unità.
He found new spaces for his periodic writings in the magazines Passato e Presente and Italia Domani. Together with Vittorini he became a co-editor of Il Menabò di letteratura, a position that he held for many years.
Despite the previously severe restrictions for foreigners holding communist views, he was allowed to visit the United States, where he stayed six months (four of which he spent in New York), after an invitation by the Ford Foundation.
Back in Italy, and once again working for Einaudi, he started publishing some of his cosmicomics in Il Caffè, a literary magazine.
Vittorini's death in 1966 had a heavy influence on Calvino and caused him to experience what has been defined as an "intellectual depression", which the writer himself described as an important passage in his life: "...I ceased to be young.
He then started to frequent Paris (where he was nicknamed L'ironique amusé).
Calvino also had more intense contacts with the academic world, with notable experiences at the Sorbonne (with Barthes) and at Urbino's university. His interests included classical studies (Honoré de Balzac, Ludovico Ariosto, Dante, Ignacio de Loyola, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Cyrano de Bergérac, Giacomo Leopardi) while at the same time, not without a certain surprise from the Italian intellectual circles, he wrote novels for Playboy's Italian edition (1973).
In 1975 he was made Honorary Member of the American Academy, the following year he was awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Literature.
In 1981 he was awarded the prestigious French Légion d'Honneur.
In 1985 he died in Siena at the ancient hospital of Santa Maria della Scala of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Bibliography
(dates are of original publication)
The Path to the Nest of Spiders (Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, 1947) Ultimo viene il corvo (1949) I giovani del Po (1951) Il cavaliere inesistente and Il Visconte dimezzato (The Nonexistent Knight (1951) Il Visconte dimezzato (The Cloven Viscount (1959) The Argentine Ant (La formica argentina, 1952) L'entrata in guerra (1954) Italian Folktales (Fiabe Italiane, 1956, retelling of traditional stories) La panchina (1956, libretto for the opera by Sergio Liberovici) I racconti (1958) The Baron in the Trees (Il barone rampante, 1957) Our Ancestors (I nostri antenati, 1959, collection of Il cavaliere inesistente, Il Visconte dimezzato and Il barone rampante) Marcovaldo (1963) The Watcher (La giornata di uno scrutatore, 1963) La speculazione edilizia (1963) Cosmicomics (Cosmicomiche, 1965) t zero (Ti con zero, 1967) The Castle of Crossed Destinies (Il castello dei destini incrociati, 1969) Difficult Loves (Gli amori difficili, 1970, stories from the 1940s and 1950s) Invisible Cities (Le città invisibili, 1972) Il nome, il naso (1973) Autobiografia di uno spettatore (1974) La corsa delle giraffe (1975) The Watcher and other stories (1963, short story collection) If On a Winter's Night a Traveler (Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, 1979) (English translation ISBN 0-919630-23-5) The Uses of Literature (1980, 1982, essays) La vera storia (1982, libretto for the opera by Luciano Berio) Mr. Palomar - Palomar (1983) Fantastic Stories (Racconti Fantastici Dell'Ottocento, two volumes, 1983) Science et métaphore chez Galilée (1983, lectures at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes de la Sorbonne) Collezione di sabbia (1984, essays)Posthumous editions:
Under the Jaguar Sun (Sotto il sole giaguaro, 1988, short story collection) Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Lezioni americane, 1988, lectures) The Road to San Giovanni (La strada di San Giovanni, 1990, autobiographical stories) Numbers in the Dark (1993)
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