Carlo Levi Biography and List of WorksBooks by Carlo Levi | Shop used books at Biblio.com  Italian writer, journalist, artist, and doctor, whose first documentary novel, Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945), became an international sensation and enhanced the trend toward social realism in post-war Italian literature. Although Levi's masterpiece was set in the times of Fascist oppression before World War II, it still has not lost its broad appeal. The book did much to make the world understand the situation of the regions south of Rome, which have been long exploited for economic or political reasons.
Levi was born in Turin. He studied medicine and became a practicing physician. From his earliest formative years, Levi came into contact with socialist ideology, and in 1930 he established the resistance movement 'Giustizia e Libertà'. As a Jew and for his antifascist activities he was exiled from 1935 to 1936 in two isolated villages in the province of Lucania, where his house is now a tourist attraction. The years of his banishment Levi spent in fruitful activity - he continued as a painter and worked as the physician to the villagers. After release he lived in France between 1939 and 1941. In 1939 appeared Levi's essay 'Paura della libertá,' which constitutes an impassioned demonstration of the coercive irrationality of dictatorship. During World War two, when hiding in a room for several months in order to avoid deportation as a Jew by the retreating Nazin, Levi wrote CRISTO SI È FERMATO A EBOLI. On one level Levi chronicled his own life and on another he gives a gallery of portraits of individuals, such as the Fascist mayor, Giulia, who had more than a dozen pregnancies with more than a dozen men, and the town crier. The documentary report on the archaic life is skilfully developed into a work of conscious literary art.  Though Levi's first novel gained a huge success, and made him one of the leaders of the Neo-realism, he wrote other important non-fiction works. In Of Fear and Freedom (1946) he proclaimed intellectual freedom despite an inherent human dread of it. L'OROLOGIO (1950) was set in the disillusioned period after war. The protagonist works in Rome for a newspaper. His friends, family and partisan comrades are all trying to cope with the rock wall of conservative reaction.
Levi's commitment to the lot of the victims pervaded his work as an editor and journalist. He contributed to major Italian publications and as a painter he sought to express arcane reality. Levi was active in politics. He was elected to the Senate in 1963, and served until his death on January 4, 1975. Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (1945; Christ stopped at Eboli) - a compassionate account of life in the village Gagliano, Lucana. The narrator, a doctor, is living there as a political prison. He is allowed to visit occasionally Eboli, the central town of the region. He helps people who are suffering from malaria. Through his sister he also receives medicine and witnesses how the hard conditions drive people to emigrate in the United States. When Italia's war against Abyssinia is drawing to its close in 1936, the narrator's detention ends. He summarises his experiences that Christ have forgotten the region behind Eboli and never visited it. For further reading: Open City: Seven Writers in Post War Rome, ed. by William Weaver and Kristina Olson (1999); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3); Carlo Levi by M. Baldassaro (1998); Antifascisms: Cultural Politics in Italy, 1943-46 by David Ward (1996); Structure and Style as Fundamental Expression by R.D. Catani (1979, in Italica, 56, pp. 213-29); Carlo Levi: The Essayist as a Novelist by S. Pacifici (1979, in The Modern Italian Novel) - See also: Pier Paolo Pasolini; other famous writers and physicians: Anton Chekhov, Axel Munthe Free shipping on select books. No minimum purchase
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