Primo Levi

Levi trained as a chemist at the University of Turin, graduating in 1941 under racial laws that already barred Jews from earning an ordinary degree. Captured as a partisan in 1943, he was deported the following year to Auschwitz's Monowitz labor camp, where his chemistry training, put to use in a synthetic-rubber factory, was one of the accidents that kept him alive. He wrote If This Is a Man almost immediately after liberation, but Italy's leading publisher turned it down; it appeared first from a small press in 1947 and found its wide audience only after Einaudi reissued it a decade later.

For thirty years he worked by day as an industrial chemist at a paint factory outside Turin, writing at night and on weekends. The Periodic Table (1975), twenty-one chapters each keyed to an element, fused memoir and science into a form entirely his own. He died in 1987 in a fall down the stairwell of his Turin apartment building, a death still debated between accident and suicide.