Calvino, Italo (1923—85)
Italian journalist and writer. Calvino was born in Cuba, where his parents both worked as scientists---his father researched in agriculture, while his mother was a botanist. When he was 2 his family returned to Italy, settling in San Remo on a small rural property. Calvino dutifully took courses in agriculture at the Universities of Turin and Florence, but war interrupted his studies. He refused compulsory military service and instead went into hiding and joined the Italian Resistance, an act for which his parents (who supported his decision) were imprisoned for the duration of the war. After the war he returned to university, but abandoned agriculture and studied arts instead. After graduation, he worked in publishing and journalism. He was an active and committed member of the Communist Party, but like many European intellectuals he resigned his membership following the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. He moved to Paris in 1967, where he met Raymond Queneau (who encouraged him to join OULIPO), Barthes, Roland, and Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Calvino wrote a wide variety of fiction and non-fiction, and though some of his early work is realist in style, it is his later more experimental work, variously labelled postmodern, magical realism, and metafiction, that earned him his huge international following. His most widely read work is Se una notte d’inverno un viaggatore (1979), translated as If on Winter’s Night a Traveller (1981).