Cesare Pavese was an Italian poet, novelist, literary critic and translator. He is widely considered among the major authors of the 20th century in his home country. His work fuses considerations of poetic and epic representation, the theme of solitude, and the concept of myth.

The youngest of five children in a lower middle class family of rural origin, Cesare Pavese was born on 9th September 1908 in S. Stefano Belbo (province of Cuneo). It was the village where his father was born and where the family returned for the summer holidays each year. He lived with his parents and, after their death, with his sister's family until the end of his life. His father died when he was six.

He went to school in Turin, studying at high school under Augusto Monti, a friend of Piero Gobetti and Antonio Gramsci and a prominent figure in the anti-fascist Turin. As a young man of letters, Pavese had a particular interest in English-language literature, graduating from the University of Turin in 1932 with a thesis on the poetry of Walt Whitman. During the same period he began working as a translator for the publisher Frassinelli, translating Moby Dick by Melville and Dark Laughter by Sherwood Anderson.

In 1934 he was appointed editor of the magazine Cultura. In May 1935 he was arrested with members of the anti-Fascist group Giustizia e Libertà and was expelled from the Fascist party, to which he had belonged since 1932. After a few months in prison he was sent into "confino", internal exile in Brancaleone Calabro, Southern Italy, the commonly used sentence for those guilty of lesser political crimes. (Carlo Levi, also from Turin, was similarly sent into confino.) Pavese returned to Turin in 1936, having been pardoned, and he continued his translations and began to work full time for the left wing publisher Giulio Einaudi in 1938. Pavese began his career with poetry in 1936 with the collection of verses entitled Lavorare stanca (Hard Labour).

He was in Rome when he was called up into the fascist army, but because of his asthma he spent six months in a military hospital. When he returned to Turin, German troops occupied the streets and most of his friends had left to fight as partisans. He took refuge with his sister in Serralunga after 8 September, and at the end of the war joined the Italian Communist Part (PCI). In 1945 he published I dialoghi col compagno in L'Unità, the party's newspaper.

The bulk of his work was published during this time. Towards the end of his life, he visited frequently Le Langhe, the area where he was born, where he found great solace. However, love frustrations (Constance Dowling, to whom his last novel was dedicated) and political disillusionment led him to his suicide, by an overdose of barbiturates, on 27 August 1950 in the Hotel Roma in Turin.

Pavese's first published novel, Paesi tuoi (Your Villages, 1941), represents, with Elio Vittorini's Conversazione in Sicilia (1941), a point of departure for Italian neorealism. Its programmatic flouting of conventions in all possible aspects--in language, style, and theme--and its almost documentary nature set a pattern for that whole movement. The novel was based on the antinomical character of country life and city life; yet the former was not at all idealized but shown in its bare, raw, and wretched existence with its story of incestuous passion. Nevertheless, there was an underlying nostalgic feeling for the earth, for the primeval, a mythical yearning for a return to the fountains, to the springtide of life, that underlies all of Pavese's writing.

The three stories published together in 1949--La bella estate (The Fine Summer, written 1940), Il diavolo sulle colline (written 1948), and Tra donne sole (Women on their own, written 1949)--center on man's encounter with the city. As fascinating as the city might have seemed initially, it leads to complete disillusionment and isolation, entailing the impossibility of a return to the paradise of yore. This disillusionment is the experience of the women protagonists of La bella estate and Tra donne sole, as well as that of the couple in the symbolically charged Il diavolo sulle colline. La luna e i falò (The Moon and the Bonfire, 1950; written 1949) represents a sum total of Pavesian symbolism and the thematic myth of the eternal return. It is to the hills of Santo Stefano Belbo, the hills of his childhood, that the protagonist, symbolically called Anguilla, returns, only to leave them again in search of his true self.

Feria d'agosto (August Holiday, 1946) is a collection of prose poems and theoretical notes on the subjects of myth and childhood.

I dialoghi con Leucò (Dialogues with Leucò, 1947)--in the guise of a conversation between mortals and Olympians--presents the result of Pavese's inquiries into the problems and implications of myth along the lines of Viconian philosophy and Jungian thought.

La letteratura americana e altri saggi (1951) contains Pavese's critical writings on American literature, a considerable amount of which he translated.

Il mestiere de vivere (The business of living: Diaries 1935-1950 published posthumously in 1952), ranks as one of the outstanding documents of its time. Also posthumously published were the short-story collection Notte di festa (1953; written 1936-1938) and the novel Fuoco grande (1959; written with Bianca Garufi in 1946). He also wrote the the poems of Verrà la morte ed avrà i tuoi occhi (Death will come and will have your eyes, 1951).

Pavese was without doubt the most universally cultured Italian writer of his generation. Shy, introspective, and suffering from numerous neuroses, he counted among the great experiences of his life his encounter with American literature and with myth, the latter becoming increasingly dominant in his work. Thus the idea of the return to the past that the artist must accomplish and the treasury of memory both play an important part in his literary approach, for which he believed he had found the answer in myth. A central theme of his work is, furthermore, the question of solitude in all its aspects.

The typical protagonist in the works of Pavese is a loner, through choice or through circumstances. His relationships with men and women tend to be temporary and superficial. He may wish to have more solidarity with other humans, but he often ends up betraying his ideals and friends; for example in Il carcere (The Prison, 1949), the political exile in a village in Southern Italy receives a note from another political confinato living nearby, who suggests a meeting. The protagonist rejects a show of solidarity and refuses to meet him. The title of the collection of the two novellas is Prima che il gallo canti (Before the Cock Crows, 1949), a reference to Peter's betrayal of Christ.

Selected works:

• Lavorare stanca (Hard Labour), poems 1936; expanded edition 1943
• Paesi tuoi (Your Villages), novel 1941
• La Spiaggia (The Beach), novel 1941
• Feria d'agosto (August Holiday) 1946
• Il Compagno (The comrade), novel 1947
• I dialoghi con Leucò (Dialogues with Leucò), 1947
• Prima che il gallo canti (Before the Cock Crows), two novellas La casa in collina (The house on the hill) and Il carcere (The Prison), 1949
• La bella estate (The Fine Summer), Three novellas including Tra donne sole (Women on their own) and Il diavolo sulle colline, 1949
• La luna e i falò (The Moon and the Bonfire), novel 1950
• Verrà la morte ed avrà i tuoi occhi (Death will come and will have your eyes), poems, 1951
• La letteratura americana e altri saggi, 1951
• Il mestiere de vivere: Diario 1935–1950 (The business of living: Diaries 1935-1950), 1952
• Saggi Letterari (Literary Essays)
• Racconti – two volumes of short stories
• Lettere 1926-1950 (Letters 1926-1950) – two volumes of letters
• Notte di festa, 1956
• Fuoco grande, 1959

Bibliography about Cesare Pavese:

• Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature , edited by Stanley J. Kunitz, 1955