Italo Svevo

Born Ettore Schmitz to a Jewish merchant family in the free port of Trieste, Svevo spent his working life in a bank and then his father-in-law's marine paint business, writing two novels in his spare hours that sold almost nothing and drew no notice.

Around 1907 he hired a young English teacher named James Joyce, showed him the neglected books, and found in him the first reader who understood what he was doing; the friendship and Joyce's own example of interior, ironic narration reshaped how Svevo wrote.

Zeno's Conscience (1923), a mock case-history that a chronic quitter of smoking submits to his psychoanalyst, went almost unnoticed in Italy until French critics, tipped off by Joyce, hailed it in 1925: sudden, late fame that Svevo enjoyed for barely three years before dying in a car accident in 1928.