Pavese, Cesare

(1908–1950)

   One of the leading novelists associated with neorealism, Cesare Pavese was born in Cuneo (Piedmont). He took his degree in literature in 1930 and worked as a teacher of English while publishing critical essays on modern American writers such as Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis, and, above all, Herman Melville, whose Moby Dick Pavese translated into Italian. In 1936 (the year in which his first volume of poems appeared), Pavese was sentenced to a period of confino in a remote Calabrian village for passing on politically compromising letters to a communist militant with whom he was having an affair. As a known antifascist, Pavese was forced to live in hiding in the countryside during the last months of the war, and this experience—together with the political fervor engendered in him by his decision to join the Partito Comunista Italiano/Italian Communist Party (PCI)—led him to produce by 1950 a string of novels and stories that have become classics of contemporary Italian literature. La Casa in collina (The House on the Hill), Il Compagno (The Comrade), and La Luna e i falo (The Moon and the Bonfires) all appeared between 1947 and 1950, and they permanently established Pavese’s reputation as one of the most acute writers in modern fiction. Of all the Italian neorealist writers, he is the one whose work seems most likely to stand the test of time, though some of his later work, notably La Bella Estate (The Fine Summer), a 1949 collection of three stories, showed that he was chafing under the restrictions of the neorealist genre. Pavese committed suicide in 1950. The publication of his diaries in 1952 showed that he had long been struggling with a profound sense of personal anguish.