Elio Vittorini - Life, Partial bibliography

Novelist, critic, and translator, born in Syracuse, Sicily, S Italy. He educated himself despite great obstacles, and became Italy's most influential writer of his time, known for the help he gave to younger writers. He was founder editor of Il Politecnico (1945–7) and Il Menabò (1959–66), and translated modern US writers such as Poe, Steinbeck, and Faulkner. Conversazione in Sicilia (1941, Conversations in Sicily) is his masterpiece.

Elio Vittorini (July 23, 1908 - February 12, 1966) was an Italian writer and novelist. His best-known work is the anti-fascist novel Conversations in Sicily, for which he was jailed when it was published in 1941. The first U.S. edition of the novel, published in 1949, included an introduction from Ernest Hemingway, whose style influenced Vittorini and that novel in particular.

Life

Vittorini was born in Syracuse, Sicily, and throughout his childhood moved around Sicily with his father, a railroad worker. For a brief period, he found employment as a construction worker in the Julian March, after which he moved to Florence to work as a type corrector (a line of work he abandoned in 1934 due to lead poisoning). Around 1927 his work began to be published in literary journals. In many cases, separate editions of his novels and short stories from this period, such as The Red Carnation were not published until after World War II, due to fascist censorship.

After the war, Vittorini chiefly concentrated on his work as editor, helping publish work by young Italians such as Calvino and Fenoglio. His last major published work of fiction during his lifetime was 1956's Erica and her Sisters. The news of the events of the Hungarian Uprising deeply shook his convictions in Communism and made him decide to largely abandon writing, leaving unfinished work which was to be published in unedited form posthumously.

Partial bibliography

Racconti di piccola borghesia (1931) Il garofano rosso (The Red Carnation, 1933, published as a book in 1948) Conversazione in Sicilia (Conversations in Sicily, 1939) Uomini e no (Men and not Men, 1945) Le donne de Messina (Women of Messina, 1949) Erica e suoi fratelli (Erica and her Brothers, 1956)

He also translated the works of Defoe, Poe, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Lawrence, Maugham and others into Italian.