Cesare Pavese

Italian · 1908 to 1950

Born on September 9, 1908, in the village of Santo Stefano Belbo in the Piedmontese hills of Cuneo, Cesare Pavese was the son of a court clerk who died of a brain tumour when the boy was six. His mother, austere and unembraceable, raised him in Turin, where he attended the Liceo Massimo d'Azeglio under the antifascist teacher Augusto Monti. At the University of Turin he wrote his thesis on Walt Whitman and joined the circle around the publisher Giulio Einaudi, translating Melville's Moby-Dick at twenty-three in a version that became canonical Italian. In 1935 he was arrested for keeping the letters of an antifascist friend and sentenced to confino, internal exile, in the Calabrian village of Brancaleone. A year later he returned to Turin and to Einaudi, where he would work the rest of his life. While his friends took to the hills as partisans in 1943, Pavese spent the war hidden in a convent and on a farm near Casale Monferrato, a withdrawal he never forgave himself. After 1945 he joined the Italian Communist Party and wrote his best work in five rushed years: the novellas of The Beautiful Summer (1949), the dialogues with classical figures in Dialogues with Leucò (1947), and The Moon and the Bonfires (1950), the story of an emigrant's return to his Piedmont village to find what the war had done. He won the Strega Prize that summer. He had been in love with the American actress Constance Dowling, who left him. On August 27, 1950, in a hotel room in Turin, he swallowed an overdose of barbiturates. He was forty-one.