Umberto Eco

Eco trained as a medievalist and philosopher at the University of Turin, writing his dissertation on Aquinas's aesthetics before building an academic career at the University of Bologna, where he helped found the discipline of semiotics in Italy and published dense theoretical books like The Open Work and A Theory of Semiotics for two decades before he wrote a word of fiction.

He was forty-eight when The Name of the Rose (1980) appeared, folding his medieval scholarship and semiotic theory into a murder mystery set in a fourteenth-century monastery library; it sold millions of copies worldwide and was filmed with Sean Connery. Foucault's Pendulum (1988) followed with an even denser conspiracy of esoteric lore. He kept teaching, writing newspaper columns, and building a personal library of some thirty thousand volumes until his death in Milan in 2016.