ABSTRACT

Ignazio Silone was born as Secondo Tranquilli, the son of a poor family of peasants and weavers in the Abruzzi town of Pescina, on May 1,1900, a date that even the most absent-minded would remember. Silone's career as an Italian communist and his break with the Stalinist Comintern has often been described, and nowhere better than in his own still valuable account in Crossman's volume called The God that Failed. In the Mussolini years he lived in exile in Switzerland, mostly in Zurich. In a sense he was "doubly alienated", having broken with both comrades and country, and it left literature as his only home. Silone always preferred to be an old-fashioned, rather than a fashionable, writer. Yet he always appeared to be spanning a vast arc from the ancient past to the imminent future, from a bygone world of feudal and Christian values to the "Post Industrial Society".