Pavese, Cesare ___ 1908-1950 ___ Italian ___ writer

BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY
Pavese was born in the village of Santo Stefano between Turin and the Alps. His father worked as a magistrate clerk, but died when he was still young. Pavese studied literature at university, and graduated in 1930 with a thesis on Walt Whitman. Subsequently, he wrote essays on American literature and translated literary texts into Italian. His mother died in 1931, and he went to live with his sister Maria and her family, also in Turin. While the fascists were becoming stronger by the day, Pavese fell in love with Tina Pizzardo, a Communist teacher and activist. In 1935, the police found some incriminating letters (which Tina had received, at Pavese's house, from a collaborator). He was arrested, jailed briefly, and then exiled to Calabria for three years. Tina, meanwhile, left him and married someone else. While always gravitating towards anti-fascist sympathisers, Pavese himself found it difficult to be active in the resistance movement. However, when he returned to Turin after the war, and finding some of his friends dead, Pavese did join the Communist Party and become more politically active. But it was literature that remained his first love. His novels won several prestigious prizes, and he is well regarded for his love poetry. In 1950, Pavese fell in love again, with a young American actress, Constance Dawling, to whom he dedicated his last novel 'The Moon and the Bonfires', but she left him too. In June the same year, he killed himself in a hotel room. There is quite a bit in his diary about suicide, and its last words have become famous: 'All this is sick. Not words. An act. I won't write any more.'
A biography link
Wikipedia bio

DIARY DATES, CONTENT DESCRIPTORS
1935-1950 ___ literary political self love/sex Nazism

WEB TEXT LINKS
short quotes

ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT LINKS
Centro studi Cesare Pavese - possibly

SOME PUBLISHED TITLES
The Burning Brand: Diaries 1935-1950
This Business of Living
 

May 2005, April 2008
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IMPORTANT NOTES AND CAUTIONS: 1) The first line of basic information may be incomplete in several ways: some historical figures have different names (titles, pen-names); their birth and death dates may be unknown or uncertain (g - guess, c - circa); similarly, their occupations may be unknown, or they may have had other jobs; and, for early diarists, I've used 'British' a bit too freely. 2) The biographical summary may not be accurate. It was compiled quickly from various sources, mostly on the internet, and the facts were not checked anywhere near as rigorously as they would have been if they'd been intended for publication in a printed form. 3) The journal dates and descriptors (which are in no particular order) must be treated with caution: since I have not examined the diaries myself, the descriptors are only guesses based on bibliographies, anthologies and internet biographies. 4) For the biography and etext links, I have ignored any sites with charges, and I have avoided, wherever possible, those with pop-ups or too much advertising. I have limited myself to providing three etext links where there is some variety between them. 5) For the original manuscript links, I have limited myself to providing a maximum of two (although, for a few diarists, their original diaries are held in more than two places). 6) I have provided the titles - chosen randomly - for up to three printed editions of the diaries.