Vittorini, Elio

(1908–1966)

   Born in 1908 in Syracuse (Sicily), Vittorini was one of the most influential editors and writers of postwar Italy. His first steps into the literary world came during the late 1920s, when he began to collaborate with Solaria, the Florentine literary periodical edited by Eugenio Montale. In 1933, Solaria began publishing his first novel, Il garofano rosso (The Red Carnation), in installments, but the censor, disliking this study of a youth whose adolescent rebelliousness finds an outlet in the violence and camaraderie of the Fascist movement, suspended publication. In the late 1930s, Vittorini translated American realists, such as John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway. Their influence can be seen in his two most important novels, Conversazione in Sicilia (Conversations in Sicily, 1942) and Uomini e no (Men and Others, 1945), which was based on his experiences as a wartime partisan in Milan.

   In 1945, Vittorini became a member of the Partito Comunista Italiano/Italian Communist Party (PCI) and founded Il Politecnico, the theoretical journal of the neorealist movement in the arts. The review closed in 1947 after Vittorini clashed with Palmiro Togliatti, the secretary of the PCI, who accused Vittorini of privileging literary culture over political commitment. Vittorini replied that the PCI should not expect writers to merely “blow the revolution’s flute.” To preserve his independence, Vittorini left the PCI in 1951. In 1950, he became an editor for the Turin publisher, Einaudi, responsible for discovering and nurturing new writers of talent. Vittorini’s political and literary preferences were not always helpful in this role. In 1957, he rejected Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa’s remarkable novel Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), on the grounds that it was reactionary in sentiment and over-literary in language and style. After the mid-1950s, Vittorini published no more novels. He was joint editor, however, with Italo Calvino, of the avant-garde journal Menabo from 1960 onward. He died in Milan in 1966.

   See also Literature.