Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Born Giuseppe Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa and Duke of Palma, on December 23, 1896, in Palermo, Sicily, into one of the island's oldest and most distinguished aristocratic families. A reserved, solitary child, he later wrote, "I was a boy who liked solitude, who preferred the company of things to that of people", he grew up among crumbling palaces and ancestral libraries, absorbing the melancholy of a class whose world was slowly vanishing. He served as an artillery officer in the First World War and was captured; he escaped from a Hungarian prisoner-of-war camp and walked home across most of Europe. In 1932 he married Alexandrine von Wolff-Stomersee, a Latvian baroness and psychoanalyst. He spent decades reading, in 1954 he estimated that of his sixteen waking hours, at least ten were spent in solitude with books, and occasionally delivered private literary lectures to a small circle of friends in Palermo. He published virtually nothing. Then, around 1955, at the age of fifty-eight, he began writing a novel he had contemplated for twenty-five years: a historical portrait of his great-grandfather, Don Giulio Fabrizio Tomasi, set against the upheaval of the Risorgimento. Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) was rejected by both Mondadori and Einaudi during his lifetime. He died of lung cancer in Rome on July 23, 1957, believing his only novel would never be published. The manuscript was championed by the writer Giorgio Bassani and published by Feltrinelli in 1958; it became the best-selling novel in Italian history, won the Strega Prize in 1959, and was adapted into Luchino Visconti's celebrated 1963 film.