Italian literary critic, novelist, and semiotician (student of signs and symbols).

Born in Alessandria in Italy, Umberto Eco is one of the most aphomeciated modern Italian writers, both at home as well as abroad.

Son of a family with thirteen children, and urged by his father to become a lawyer, he entered the University of Turin. But, as what seems to be the fate of many great writers, he abandoned his studies of law; and against his father's wishes he took up medieval philosophy and literature, writing his thesis on Thomas Aquinas and earning his doctorate of philosophy in 1954.

After this, Eco worked as a cultural editor for Italian Radio-Television and also lectured at the University of Turin (1956-64). In 1956, he published his first book, which was naturally an extension of his thesis: Il problema estetico in San Tommaso.

In 1959 he both published his second work and lost his job at the RAI. The book, Sviluppo dell'estetico medievale, was significant in that not only did it establish Eco as one of the foremost thinkers in medievalism, but it finally convinced his father that he had indeed made the right career decision. The loss of his position was assuaged by his increasing demand as a lecturer and as a teacher, and in 1959 he became the nonfiction senior editor of Casa Editrice Bompiani, Milan; a position he would hold until 1975.

During these years Eco began seriously developing his ideas on the "open" text and on semiotics, penning many essays on these subjects, and in 1962 he published Opera aperta, or The Open Work. In September of that same year he married Renate Ramge, a German art instructor.

In 1964 Eco moved to Milan and took up a position as a lecturer, but a year later he was elected Professor of Visual Communications at Florence. In 1966 he migrated to the Milan Polytechnic as a Professor of Semiotics, and in the same year he published Le poetische di Joyce: dall "summa" al "Finnegans Wake." In Milan he began to organize his theories of semiotics, and in 1968 he published his first text purely on that subject: La struttura assente (The Absent Structure) This book, which would later be completely revised and retitled A Theory of Semiotics in 1976, set the tone for the direction of his study after his interest in medieval aesthetics transmutated into a more general interest in cultural values and literature as a whole.

In 1971 assumed a professorial post at the University of Bologna. In 1975 he strated writing a column for Il Verri, a magazine centered on modernist ideas and linguistics. This gave him the possibility also to write articles for the major national newspapers. During these years he began developing his ideas on semiotics and published three more books on the subject. In 1979 Eco edited A Semiotic Landscape, a collection of essays that had their origins in the conference.

All his work on the Middle Ages became an idea for a novel that was the summary of all his learnings so far but also a possibility to mix diverse subjects. His fantasy novel Il nome della rosa (1981; The Name of the Rose)--in story, a murder mystery set in a 14th-century Italian monastery but, in essence, a questioning of "truth" from theological, philosophical, scholarly, and historical perspectives--became an international best-seller (his publishers believed it would sell mildly and certainly not nine million copies). At first, Eco played with the idea of placing his detective story in a modern setitbusng; but soon he realized that his interest in medievalism was manifesting a story set in the Middle Ages. Dragging out notebooks, clippings, papers, and articles that dated all the way back to 1952, Eco began the task of writing a novel tentatively called "Murder in the Abbey." Soon, however, he decided that this title would place undue focus on the "mystery" aspect of his story, whereas he wanted a novel that could be read as an open text -- enigmatic, complex, and open to several layers of interpretation. Inspired by the title of David Copperfield, "Adso of Melk," became the next working title, but eventually a few lines of medieval verse produced the more poetic The Name of the Rose. A film version, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, appeared in 1986.

Published in 1988, Foucault's Pendulum was another immediate success, establishing Eco firmly in the ranks of the world's Important Novelists. And although he claimed that he had no plans for another novel, a few years later, The Island of the Day Before would be developed from Eco's ideas about "writing about pure nature" within "a story of concepts."

Other works from this author are Postscript to the Name of the Rose and, more recently, the novel Baudolino.

The Name of the Rose (Il nome della rosa) The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective. His tools are the logic of Aristotle, the theology of Aquinas, the empirical insights of Roger Bacon - all sharpened to a glistening edge by wry humor and a ferocious curiosity. He collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey, where "the most interesting things happen at night".