ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to contribute to the study of Italo Svevo's biography by focusing on his early beginnings as a journalist with literary aspirations. It argues that Svevo's journalism, often neglected by critics, offers in fact an important starting point for the analysis of his first steps on the road to literature and literary criticism. Svevo's championing of Zola and Alphonse Daudet, both of them writers who were openly supporting change in the Trench literary establishment, suggests a positive attitude towards the democratization of art. Like James Joyce, Svevo left traces of his autobiography in all his works, and he did so paradoxically while trying to follow thecf in fiction. While this intertwining of life and fiction has already received considerable attention, Svevo's agency in trying to achieve a literary reputation has often been toned down, if not ignored, in obedience to his own claim of having always been an 'amateur writer'.
