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'Italo Calvino' (October 15, 1923 – September 19, 1985) (pronounced ) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the ''Our Ancestors'' trilogy (1952-1959), the ''Cosmicomics'' collection of short stories (1965), and the novels ''Invisible Cities'' (1972) and ''If on a winter's night a traveler'' (1979).
His style is not easily classified; much of his writing has an air of light fantasy reminiscent of fairy tales (''Our Ancestors'', ''Cosmicomics''), although sometimes his writing is more "realistic" and in the scenic mode of observation (''Difficult Loves'', for example). Some of his writing has been called "postmodern", reflecting on literature and the act of reading, while some has been labeled "magical realist", others fables, others simply "modern". Twelve years before his death, he was invited to and joined the Oulipo group of experimental writers. He wrote: "my working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language."

Contents

Biography

Bibliography

Quotations

Authors he helped publish

References

External links

Biography

Born in Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba, to botanists Mario Calvino and Evelina Mameli and brother of Floriano Calvino, a famous geologist, Italo Calvino soon moved to his family's homeland of Italy, where he lived most of his life.
He stayed in Sanremo, on the Italian Riviera, and became a member of the ''Avanguardisti'' (a fascist youth organisation of which membership was practically compulsory) with whom he took part in the occupation of the French Riviera. He suffered some religious troubles, his relatives being openly atheist in a largely Catholic country, and was sent to attend a Waldensian private school. He met Eugenio Scalfari (later a politician and the founder of the major Italian newspaper ''La Repubblica''), with whom he would remain a close friend.
In 1941 he moved to Turin, after a long hesitation over living there or in Milan. He often humorously described this choice, and used to describe Turin as "a city that is serious but sad."
In 1943 he joined the Partisans in the Italian Resistance, in the Garibaldi brigade, with the battlename of ''Santiago'', and with Scalfari he created the MUL (liberal universitarian movement). He then entered the (still clandestine) Italian Communist Party.
Calvino graduated from Turin's university in 1947 with a thesis on Joseph Conrad and started working with the official Communist paper ''L'Unità''; he also had a short relationship with the Einaudi publishing house, which put him in contact with Norberto Bobbio, Natalia Ginzburg, Cesare Pavese and Elio Vittorini. With Vittorini he wrote for the weekly ''Il Politecnico'' (a cultural magazine associated with the university). He then left Einaudi to work mainly with ''L'Unità'' and the newborn communist weekly political magazine ''Rinascita''.
He worked again for the Einaudi house from 1950, responsible for the literary volumes. The following year, presumably in order to advance in the communist party, he visited the Soviet Union. The reports and correspondence he produced from this visit were later collected and earned him literary prizes.
In 1952 Calvino wrote with Giorgio Bassani for ''Botteghe Oscure'', a magazine named after the popular name of the party's head-offices, and worked for ''Il Contemporaneo'', a Marxist weekly.
From 1955 to 1958 he had an affair with the actress Elsa de' Giorgi, an older and married woman. Calvino wrote hundreds of love letters to her, and excerpts were published by ''Corriere della Sera'' in 2004, causing some controversy.
In 1957, disillusioned by the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, Calvino left the Italian Communist party, and his letter of resignation (soon famous) was published in ''L'Unità''.
He found new outlets for his periodic writings in the magazines ''Passato e Presente'' and ''Italia Domani''. Together with Vittorini he became a co-editor of ''Il Menabò di letteratura'', a position that he held for many years.
Despite the previously severe restrictions for foreigners holding communist views, he was allowed to visit the United States, where he stayed six months from 1959 to 1960 (four of which he spent in New York), after an invitation by the Ford Foundation. Calvino was particularly impressed by the "New World": "Naturally I visited the South and also California, but I always felt a New Yorker. My city is New York."
Calvino met the Argentinian translator Esther Judith Singer (Chichita) in 1962 and married her in 1964 in Havana, during a trip in which he visited his birthplace and met Ernesto Che Guevara.
Back in Italy, and once again working for Einaudi, he started publishing some of his ''cosmicomics'' in ''Il Caffè'', a literary magazine.
Vittorini's death in 1966 had a heavy influence on Calvino and caused him to experience what has been defined as an "intellectual depression", which the writer himself described as an important passage in his life: "...I ceased to be young. Perhaps it's a metabolic process, something that comes with age, I'd been young for a long time, perhaps too long, suddenly I felt that I had to begin my old age, yes, old age, perhaps with the hope of prolonging it by beginning it early".
He then started to frequent Paris (where he was nicknamed ''L'ironique amusé''). Here he soon joined some important circles like the Oulipo (''Ouvroir de littérature potentielle'') and met Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss, in the fermenting atmosphere that was going to evolve into 1968's cultural revolution (the French May); in his French experience he also became fond of Raymond Queneau's works, which would sensibly influence his later production.
Calvino also had more intense contacts with the academic world, with notable experiences at the Sorbonne (with Barthes) and at Urbino's university. His interests included classical studies (Honoré de Balzac, Ludovico Ariosto, Dante, Ignacio de Loyola, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Cyrano de Bergérac, Giacomo Leopardi) while at the same time, not without a certain surprise from the Italian intellectual circles, he wrote novels for Playboy's Italian edition (1973). He became a regular contributor to the important Italian newspaper ''Corriere della Sera''.
In 1975 he was made Honorary Member of the American Academy, the following year he was awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. He visited Japan and Mexico and gave lectures in several American towns.
In 1981 he was awarded the prestigious French Légion d'Honneur.
In 1983 at his home in Piazza Campo Marzio (Rome), Calvino granted a series of filmed interviews on his work to Canadian director Damian Pettigrew. The transcriptions were published in ''The Paris Review'' in 1992, in ''La Repubblica'' in 1995, and in book form in Italy under the title, ''Uno scrittore pomeridiano'' in 2003. The videos now serve as the basis of a major Calvino documentary produced by ARTE France (to be aired in 2008). A unique recording of Calvino reading from his last novel, ''Mr. Palomar'' (recorded by Pettigrew on the writer's terrace), is also featured.
During the summer of 1985, Calvino prepared some notes for a series of lectures to be delivered at Harvard University in the fall. However, on 6 September, he was admitted to the ancient hospital of ''Santa Maria della Scala'' in Siena, where he died during the night between the 18 and 19 September of a cerebral hemorrhage. His lecture notes were published posthumously as ''Six Memos for the Next Millennium'' in 1988.

Bibliography

''(dates are of original publication)''

★ ''The Path to the Nest of Spiders'' (''Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno'', 1947)

★ ''Ultimo viene il corvo'' (1949)

★ ''I giovani del Po'' (1951)

★ ''The Cloven Viscount'' (''Il Visconte dimezzato'', 1951)

★ ''The Argentine Ant'' (''La formica Argentina'', 1952)

★ ''L'entrata in guerra'' (1954)

★ ''Italian Folktales'' (''Fiabe Italiane'', 1956, retelling of traditional stories)

★ ''La panchina'' (1956, libretto for the opera by Sergio Liberovici)

★ ''La nuvola di smog'' (1958)

★ ''I racconti'' (1958)

★ ''The Baron in the Trees'' (''Il barone rampante'', 1957)

★ ''The Nonexistent Knight'' (''Il cavaliere inesistente'', 1959)

★ ''Our Ancestors'' (''I nostri antenati'', 1959, collection of ''Il cavaliere inesistente'', ''Il Visconte dimezzato'' and ''Il barone rampante'')

★ ''Marcovaldo'' (1963)

★ ''The Watcher'' (''La giornata di uno scrutatore'', 1963)

★ ''La speculazione edilizia'' (1963)

★ ''Cosmicomics'' (''Cosmicomiche'', 1965)

★ ''t zero'' (''Ti con zero'', 1967)

★ ''Difficult Loves'' (''Gli amori difficili'', 1970, stories from the 1940s and 1950s)

★ ''Invisible Cities'' (''Le città invisibili'', 1972)

★ ''The Castle of Crossed Destinies'' (''Il castello dei destini incrociati'', 1973)

★ ''Il nome, il naso'' (1973)

★ ''Autobiografia di uno spettatore'' (1974)

★ ''La corsa delle giraffe'' (1975)

★ The Watcher and other stories ''(1963, short story collection)

★ ''If On a Winter's Night a Traveler'' (''Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore'', 1979) (English translation ISBN 0-919630-23-5)

★ ''The Uses of Literature'' (1980, 1982, essays)

★ ''La vera storia'' (1982, libretto for the opera by Luciano Berio)

★ ''Mr. Palomar'' - ''Palomar'' (1983)

★ ''Fantastic Stories'' (''Racconti Fantastici Dell'Ottocento'', two volumes, 1983)

★ ''Science et métaphore chez Galilée'' (1983, lectures at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes de la Sorbonne)

★ ''Collezione di sabbia'' (1984, essays)
Posthumous editions:

★ ''Under the Jaguar Sun'' (''Sotto il sole giaguaro'', 1988, short story collection)

★ ''Six Memos for the Next Millennium'' (''Lezioni americane'', 1988, lectures)

★ ''The Road to San Giovanni'' (''La strada di San Giovanni'', 1990, autobiographical stories)

★ ''Why Read the Classics?'' (''Perché Leggere i Classici'', 1991, essays)

★ ''Numbers in the Dark'' (1993)

Quotations

'Italo Calvino':
{{cquote|Then we have computer science. It is true that software cannot exercise its powers of lightness except through the weight of hardware. But it is the software that gives the orders, acting on the outside world and on machines that exist only as functions of software and evolve so that they can work out ever more complex programs. The second industrial revolution, unlike the first, does not present us with such crushing images as rolling mills and molten steel, but with "bits" in a flow of information traveling along circuits in the form of electronic impulses. The iron machines still exist, but they obey the orders of weightless bits. (''Six Memos for the Next Millennium {Lightness}'')}}
'Gore Vidal':
'Salman Rushdie':

Authors he helped publish

★ Mario Rigoni Stern

★ Gianni Celati

★ Andrea De Carlo

References

★ McLaughlin, Martin. ''Italo Calvino''. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998.

★ Bernardini, F. (Francesca Bernardini Napoletano). ''I segni nuovi di Italo Calvino''. Roma: Bulzoni, 1977.

★ Bonura, Giuseppe. ''Invito alla lettura di Calvino''. Milano: U. Mursia, 1972.

★ Di Carlo, Franco. ''Come leggere I nostri antenati''. Milano: U. Mursia, 1958.

★ Calvino, Italo. ''Uno scrittore pomeridiano'': Intervista sull'arte della narrativa a cura di William Weaver e Damian Pettigrew con un ricordo di Pietro Citati. Roma: minimum fax, 2003

★ Italian novelist's love letters turn political, ''International Herald Tribune'', 20 August 2004

External links

★ Italo Calvino at Emory University, chronology, book covers, and numerous excerpts and links

★ Outside the Town of Malbork, extensive fan-site

★ In Calvino veritas, critical essays on Calvino
;Excerpts and essays

★ If on a winter's night a traveler (A selection from the first chapter)

★ How Much Shall We Bet?, chapter 8 of Calvino's ''Cosmicomics''

★ Calvino on Myth