by author Stanislao G. Pugliese
One of the major figures of twentieth-century European literature, Ignazio Silone (1900–78) is the subject of this award-winning new biography by the noted Italian 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, the winner of the 2008 Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History, 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.
About the Author:
Stanislao G. Pugliese is a professor of modern European history at Hofstra University. A former fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Italian Academy at Columbia University, and the University of Oxford, he is the author of Carlo Rosselli: Socialist Heretic and Antifascist Exile and the translator of Silone’s Memoir from a Swiss Prison.
Thursday, May 27, 2010 – 6:00pm
Italian American Museum
155 Mulberry Street
New York, NY 10013
(Suggested Donation of $5 per person)
Seating is limited
To reserve a place for this event please call the
Italian American Museum at (212) 965-9000
or
email: info@italianamericanmuseum.org
