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Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985
ISBN: 9781400846245
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Princeton University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Calvino Italo -- Correspondence; Authors Italian -- 20th century -- Correspondence;

Acclaimed Italian author Calvino (1923-1985) is best known for his fables, stories, and novels, including If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. Yet he was also a book editor, journalist, and WWII Resistance fighter. This first English translation of 650 letters spanning the period from the war years until his death include Calvino's correspondence with writers Umberto Eco, Gore Vidal, Elsa Morante, and Primo Levi; directors Michelangelo Antonioni and Pier Paolo Pasolini; composer Luciano Berio; as well as mentors, critics, and others. Elegant and generous, the letters reveal Calvino's insights on authorship ("the author... exists only in his works; outside them... he is an everyday guy, who is very careful not to 'identify' with an ideal character"), literature ("Romanticism, that great river of paradisiacal incontinence..."); the role of the critic; the influence of Roland Barthes; and tarot cards and comic strips on his work. The son of scientists, Calvino first studied agronomy, and his letters reflect these and other biographical details-his continuing sympathy toward the Italian Communist Party despite his defection in 1957, his move to Paris in 1967, and his comments on American, French, and Italian literature and society. In a letter to a journalist friend, he says that he'd like to teach "a way of looking... a way of being in the world." These letters show he succeeded. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Novelist and short story writer Italo Calvino was born in Cuba on October 15, 1923, and grew up in Italy, graduating from the University of Turin in 1947. He is remembered for his distinctive style of fables. Much of his first work was political, including Il Sentiero dei Nidi di Ragno (The Path of the Nest Spiders, 1947), considered one of the main novels of neorealism.

In the 1950s, Calvino began to explore fantasy and myth as extensions of realism. Il Visconte Dimezzato (The Cloven Knight, 1952), concerns a knight split in two in combat who continues to live on as two separates, one good and one bad, deprived of the link which made them a moral whole. In Il Barone Rampante (Baron in the Trees, 1957), a boy takes to the trees to avoid eating snail soup and lives an entire, fulfilled life without ever coming back down.

Calvino was awarded an honorary degree from Mount Holyoke College in 1984 and died in 1985, following a cerebral hemorrhage. At the time of his death, he was the most translated contemporary Italian writer and a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

(Bowker Author Biography)