One of the major figures of twentieth-century European literature, Ignazio Silone (1900-78) is the subject of this award-winning new biography by the noted Italian historian Stanislao G. Pugliese. A founding member of the Italian Communist Party, Silone took up writing only after being expelled from the PCI and garnered immediate success with his first book, Fontamara, the most influential and widely translated work of antifascism in the 1930s. In World War II, the U.S. Army printed unauthorized versions of it, along with Silone's Bread and Wine, and distributed them throughout Italy during the country's Nazi occupation. During the cold war, he was an outspoken opponent of Soviet oppression and was twice considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Twenty years after his death, Silone was the object of controversy when reports arose indicating that he had been an informant for the Fascist police. Pugliese's biography, the most comprehensive work on Silone by far and the first full-length biography to be published in English, evaluates all the evidence and paints a portrait of a complex figure whose life and work bear themes with contemporary relevance and resonance.
"In this major study, Pugliese interweaves vivid anecdote, insightful commentary, and historical fact to produce a life story of the utmost power and consequence."
Millicent Marcus, Chair of the Department of Italian Language and Literature, Yale Univers
"Pugliese's biography retrieves Silone's complex life and times with careful scholarship, exemplary fairness, and deep sympathy."
Charles S. Maier, Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History, Harvard University
