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| Works by Italo Calvino | |
|---|---|
| Name | Italo Calvino |
| Birth date | 15 October 1923 |
| Birth place | Santiago de Las Vegas |
| Death date | 19 September 1985 |
| Death place | Siena |
| Occupation | Novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist |
| Nationality | Italian |
| Notable works | If on a winter's night a traveler, Invisible Cities, The Baron in the Trees, Cosmicomics |
| Awards | Strega Prize |
Works by Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino's corpus spans novels, short stories, essays, translations, editorial projects, and unfinished manuscripts composed between the post‑World War II era and the late twentieth century. His writings intersect with movements and figures such as Neorealism, Oulipo, Giorgio Bassani, Cesare Pavese, Primo Levi, Natalia Ginzburg, and institutions including Einaudi and Mondadori, shaping Italian and international literary modernism. Calvino's works engaged with events and settings like World War II, Italian Resistance, Turin, Florence, and Rome, while contributing to debates linked to Paris Review, New York Review of Books, Festival dei Due Mondi, and prize cultures exemplified by the Strega Prize and Feltrinelli Prize.
Calvino began publishing amid the aftermath of World War II alongside contemporaries such as Elio Vittorini, Carlo Levi, Salvatore Quasimodo, Alberto Moravia, and Cesare Pavese, drawing on partisan experience in the Italian Resistance and editorial work at Einaudi. His movement from Neorealism to fantastical and structural experiments connected him to Surrealism, Structuralism, Postmodernism, and the French group Oulipo (linked to Georges Perec and Raymond Queneau). Calvino's cross‑cultural exchanges involved publishers and critics like Natalia Ginzburg, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Italo Svevo, Federico Fellini, and translators active in Paris, New York City, and London.
Calvino's major novels and collections include The Baron in the Trees, Invisible Cities, If on a winter's night a traveler, The Nonexistent Knight, and The Cloven Viscount, often published by Einaudi and reviewed in outlets such as Il Ponte, Il Mondo, and La Stampa. These books dialogued with authors and texts like Gustave Flaubert, Jorge Luis Borges, Lewis Carroll, Franz Kafka, and Giacomo Leopardi. Translations and editions tied his work to figures including William Weaver, Patrick Creagh, Vivian de Sola Pinto, and institutions such as Garzanti and Faber and Faber.
Calvino's short fiction collections—Marcovaldo, Cosmicomics, t zero, and Difficult Loves—reveal affinities with Jules Verne, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, and Giovanni Pascoli, and were circulated in magazines like Tempo and The New Yorker. Individual stories reference scientific and cultural personalities such as Galileo Galilei, Homer, Sigmund Freud, Pierre-Simon Laplace, and Niccolò Machiavelli, while engaging settings from Sardinia to Milan and narrative devices comparable to Metafiction used by John Barth and Robert Coover.
Calvino wrote essays and criticism collected in volumes like The Uses of Literature and Six Memos for the Next Millennium, contributing to periodicals including Il Politecnico, L'Espresso, Il Corriere della Sera, The New York Review of Books, and Granta. His prose essays converse with intellectuals and thinkers such as Benedetto Croce, Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Umberto Eco, and address literary history involving Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, Torquato Tasso, and Gabriele D'Annunzio.
As translator and editor, Calvino worked on texts by Jorge Luis Borges, Marcel Proust, Arthur Rimbaud, Gustave Flaubert, and Alphonse Daudet for publishers including Einaudi and Mondadori, collaborating with translators like William Weaver and critics such as Franco Fortini and Eugenio Montale. He participated in collective projects and festivals with figures like Pier Paolo Pasolini, Giorgio Bassani, Italo Svevo, and institutions including Radio 3 and Rai.
Posthumous and collected editions, compiled by editors linked to Einaudi, include drafts and fragments later published in volumes alongside commentators such as Sandro Penna, Gianni Rodari, and Silvio Ramat. Unfinished projects intersect with archives in Rome and Turin and scholarly work by critics like Angelo Maria Ripellino, Patrizia Zambon, and Rita Rizzo, discussed in symposia at University of Bologna, Columbia University, and Oxford University.
Calvino's recurring themes—identity, cityscapes, imagination, and narrative form—place him in dialogue with Borges, Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Italo Svevo, and Gustave Flaubert while critics from Harold Bloom to Svetlana Boym and Franco Moretti have analyzed his use of allegory, fable, and combinatorial techniques associated with Oulipo and Structuralism. Reception histories trace awards and recognition including the Strega Prize and academic study across Harvard University, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, University of Cambridge, and Sapienza University of Rome, and link Calvino's influence to contemporary writers such as Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco, Paul Auster, Michael Cunningham, and Kazuo Ishiguro.