Cesare Pavese

Cesare Pavese was an Italian poet, novelist, translator, and editor whose spare, melancholic prose helped define mid-twentieth-century Italian literature. Born in 1908 in Santo Stefano Belbo, a village in the Langhe hills of Piedmont, he moved with his family to Turin as a child and remained closely tied to both landscapes throughout his life.

He studied English literature at the University of Turin, writing his thesis on the poetry of Walt Whitman, and went on to translate works by Herman Melville, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Daniel Defoe, and Gertrude Stein into Italian. His translations, published largely through the Einaudi house in Turin, opened a generation of Italian readers to Anglo-American modernism.

Suspected of anti-fascist activity, he was arrested in 1935 and sent into internal exile in Calabria, an experience reflected in his early poems collected as Lavorare stanca, often translated as Hard Labor. His novels include The House on the Hill, The Moon and the Bonfires, and Among Women Only, and his diary, published posthumously as The Business of Living, traced his struggles with isolation, politics, and love.

In 1950 he was awarded the Strega Prize, Italy's most prominent literary award, for the trilogy La bella estate. A few months later, in August of that year, he took his own life in a hotel room in Turin at the age of forty-one.

The name Cesare is the Italian form of Caesar, from the Latin family name carried by Julius Caesar and his successors. It is a long-established Italian masculine name, and he carried it through a body of work that holds a central place in modern Italian letters.