Italo Calvino

Calvino was born in Cuba to Italian botanist parents and grew up in San Remo; as a teenager during the war he fought with Italian partisans in the mountains above the Ligurian coast. He joined the Communist Party and the publisher Einaudi in the same postwar years, and his first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947), was straight wartime neorealism, a style he quit almost as soon as he'd mastered it.

He left the Party after the Soviet crushing of the 1956 Hungarian uprising and turned toward fable, allegory, and formal play: a trilogy of fantastical novellas, then Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979). In Paris he joined the experimental writers' group Oulipo alongside Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec. He died in Siena in 1985 after a stroke, days before he was due to deliver Harvard's Norton Lectures, published posthumously as Six Memos for the Next Millennium.