The Modern Novel

Biography

Italo Calvino was born in 1923 in Santiago de las Vegas in Cuba. His parents were working there as botanists but the family returned permanently to Italy when Calvino was two years old, living on a farm in San Remo, where his parents continued their botanical work. He studied agriculture at the University of Turin but had to break off his studies when the Germans occupied Italy. He joined a partisan brigade but resumed his studies after the war, switching to literature and writing a thesis on Joseph Conrad. After university, he worked in publishing and journalism. He had also become a communist but left the party after the Soviet invasion of Hungary. He had started writing fiction at the end of the war, producing many stories which were only published later. His first novel – Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path to the Nest of Spiders) – was heavily influenced by the then fashionable neorealism movement and his communist views. However, he was already moving away from the standard communist approach to literature, i.e. a literature at the service of the people, and was moving towards the very individual style for which he is now known. This can already be seen in his second novel, Il visconte dimezzato (The Cloven Viscount), published in Italian in 1952.

In the mid-1960s, he started spending more time in Paris and was influenced by the French intellectuals and the 1968 events. (He later was awarded the French Légion d’honneur.) He continued to publish a series of novels which he called fables and which he maintained were just as real as realist novels. He achieved worldwide success with Le città invisibili (Invisible Cities) and, later, Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller). He died in 1985 of a brain hemorrhage. He will be remembered for producing a thoroughly original body of work, based on the fable, contemporary science and a postmodern view of reality.

Links

Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino Biography
In Calvino Veritas
Italo Calvino (1923-1985)
Italo Calvino 1923-1985
Science-Fiction and Fantasy Books by Italo Calvino
Audio Special: Celebrating Italo Calvino
Interview
Italo Calvino as Author/Game-master in If on a winter’s night a traveler
Italo Calvino (in Italian)
Italo Calvino (in Italian)
Italo Calvino: la vita e le opere (in Italian)
Italo Calvino (1923-1985) (in Italian)
Italo Calvino, il sito italiano (in Italian)
I grandi scrittori del Novecento: Italo Calvino, dalla fertilità fantastica alla
narrativa combinatoria (in Italian)
Calvino e i libri (in Italian)
La Sanremo di Calvino (in Italian)