Cesare Pavese

Pavese grew up in the Piedmont hills he'd return to in every book, and made his early living translating Melville, Faulkner, and Sinclair Lewis into Italian, work that smuggled American modernism into a culture the Fascist regime wanted closed off. His anti-fascist sympathies cost him a year of internal exile in Calabria in the mid-1930s; back in Turin he joined the publisher Einaudi as an editor, working there for the rest of his life.

He spent the war in hiding rather than fighting with the partisans, a passivity that haunted him and became the buried guilt of The House on the Hill. He joined the Communist Party after the war, and won the Strega Prize in 1950 for a trio of novellas the same year The Moon and the Bonfires appeared, tracing an emigrant's failed homecoming. Weeks after the prize, undone by an unhappy love affair with the American actress Constance Dowling, he killed himself in a Turin hotel room at forty-one.