Giovanni Verga

Verga spent his early career in Florence and Milan writing fashionable society romances for a genteel urban readership, chasing the literary success of the day. It was only in his forties, turning back to the Sicilian fishing villages of his childhood and absorbing Zola's naturalism, that he found the terse, dialect-inflected voice that made his reputation.

The House by the Medlar Tree (1881) was meant as the first of a five-novel cycle called 'I Vinti,' 'The Defeated,' tracing failure up through Sicilian society; he completed only two. Cavalleria Rusticana, a story about a fatal duel over a woman, became Mascagni's famous opera in 1890, a success that entangled Verga in years of royalty disputes.

Made a senator late in life, he died in Catania, his home city, in 1922.