Dino Buzzati

Buzzati spent nearly his entire career as a journalist for Corriere della Sera, reporting from the front as a war correspondent during the Second World War and later returning to a desk job that gave The Tartar Steppe (1940) its uncanny authenticity: a novel about a life spent waiting at a post for a meaning that never arrives, written by a man who knew office tedium from the inside.

He worked in relative obscurity for much of his career, also active as a painter and stage designer, producing surreal, myth-inflected fiction and journalism alongside his day job for decades.

He died of pancreatic cancer in Milan in 1972, having continued filing newspaper copy almost to the end.