Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone

Name: Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone
Author: Stanislao G. Pugliese
ISBN: 9781429957779

Stanislao G. Pugliese

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Stanislao G. Pugliese

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#1796 of 3,809 books · #607 in Biography & Memoir

Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography (2009).

One of the major figures of twentieth-century European literature, Ignazio Silone (1900–78) is the subject of this biography by historian Stanislao G. Pugliese. A founding member of the Italian Communist Party, Silone took up writing only after being expelled from the PCI and garnered immediate success with his first book, Fontamara, the most influential and widely translated work of antifascism in the 1930s. In World War II, the U.S. Army printed unauthorized versions of it, along with Silone's Bread and Wine, and distributed them throughout Italy during the country's Nazi occupation. During the cold war, he was an outspoken opponent of Soviet oppression and was twice considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Twenty years after his death, Silone was the object of controversy when reports arose indicating that he had been an informant for the Fascist police. Pugliese's biography, the most comprehensive work on Silone by far and the first full-length biography to be published in English, evaluates all the evidence and paints a portrait of a complex figure whose life and work bear themes with contemporary relevance and resonance. Bitter Spring won the 2008 Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History and is a memorable biography of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers against totalitarianism in all its forms, set amid one of the most troubled moments in modern history.

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