UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Lawrence G. Smith

The life and literary achievement of an important Italian writer

When he committed suicide at age forty-one, Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) was one of Italy’s best-known writers. A poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator, he had been profoundly influenced in his early years by American literature. But later he grew disaffected with American culture, coming to see it as materialistic and shallow. This book, the first full-length English-language study of Pavese in twenty years, examines his life and the evolution of his views of America through a chronological reading of his works.

As an adolescent and young man, Pavese immersed himself in American literature, especially that of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1930, at the height of Italian Fascism’s popularity, he wrote a thesis on the most democratic of America’s poets, Walt Whitman. He then supported himself by translating American fiction, most importantly Moby-Dick, and by writing essays on American authors. Pavese saw American writers, especially Whitman and Herman Melville, not only as literary exemplars but as models of manhood, guides to ways of living that he did not find in the restricted, conformist world of Mussolini’s Italy. His translations and essays represented sly acts of political and linguistic subversion but also markers of his personal and artistic self-realization.

Pavese consolidated his position in Italian letters during the five years after World War II. His finest novel, The House on the Hill, appeared in 1948, and his last and most famous, The Moon and the Bonfires, in 1950. In this same period, however, he joined the Italian Communist Party and publicly attacked America for the sterility of its culture.

Combining biography and literary analysis, Lawrence G. Smith illuminates Pavese’s life and also his tragic death, precipitated by a brief failed love affair with Constance Dowling, an American movie actress fifteen years his junior. Although he barely knew Dowling, her departure from Italy in April 1950 triggered Pavese’s long-latent suicidal impulses, and he killed himself four months later.

"Smith starts his book with a fluent and well-researched short biography, pulling together the complicated story of Pavese's intellectual and personal formation, and the path to his suicide in 1950, by way of some spectactularly botched love affairs. The story is compelling."

Times Literary Supplement

"This richly detailed, consistently fascinating study uses both biographical and literary-critical approaches to give the fullest account to date of Pavese's engagement with the U.S. . . . Highly recommended."

Choice

“An original, well-documented study that offers an insightful reading of the intense and complex relationship between Pavese and America. . . . Smith makes effective use of the rich documentation on Pavese, which includes letters, diary entries, his university thesis, translations, as well as his fiction and poetry; most importantly, he does so by presenting the material in an extremely accessible manner. . . . The book will be of interest to a wide range of readers.”

Mark Pietralunga, Florida State University

“Cesare Pavese and America succeeds masterfully in combining the biographical and the critical. An irresistible read, it at the same time sheds mutual light on the complex cultural and literary relationship between Italy and America, and gives us a fascinating glimpse of the lives of Italian writers and intellectuals living under Fascism, during the war, and in the early postwar years.”

Mary Gordon, author of Circling My Mother: A Memoir

Lawrence G. Smith received his PhD in the history of American civilization from Harvard University. He attended the University of Padua as a Fulbright scholar and taught for two years at Harvard before leaving the university to pursue a career in banking and finance. He lives in New York City.

Literary Studies / Italian Studies
352 pp., 48 illus.
$39.95 cloth, ISBN 978-1-55849-673-6
October 2008

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