Books by Natalia Ginzburg

Italian writer, novelist and essayist Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991) was born Natalia Levi in Palermo,in 1916, into a middle class family, Jewish from her father's side and Catholic from her mother's side. However, Ginzburg was brought up an atheist. In 1919 her father accepted a professorship at the University of Turin, where Ginzburg grew up in a cultural milieu. The Levi household became a meeting place for many intellectuals who opposed Benito Mussolini. Ginzburg began her studies at the University of Turin in 1935. In 1938 she married the editor and political activist Leone Ginzburg, with whom she had three children. Leone Ginzburg was a brilliant Slavist who helped to introduce Russian literature into Italy. On account of his anti-Fascist activities the couple spent some years in "confinement" in a village in the Abruzzi, before going into hiding in Rome and Florence. However, Leone Ginzburg was arrested again, and he died after torture in the Regina Coeli prison in 1944. After Allied Liberation Natalia Ginzburg returned to Rome. Ginzburg started her career as a writer publishing short stories in the distinguished Florentine periodical Solaria. Her first novella, 'La Strada Che Va In Citta', appeared in 1942 under the pseudonym Alessandra Tornimparti. It was followed by 'E Stato Cosi'(1947), 'Tutti I Nostri Ieri(1952), 'Le Voci della Sera'(1961)and the autobiographical 'Lessico Famigliare'(1963). In 1944 Ginzburg worked as an editorial consultant for the new publishing house of Giulio Einaudi in Rome and from 1945 to 1949 in Turin. In 1950 she married Gabriele Baldini, a professor of English literature at the University of Rome; he died in 1969. She lived from the 1950s mostly in Rome, where she worked in publishing. From 1959 to 1961 she lived in London. Ginzburg was elected to the Italian Parliament in 1983 as an independent left-wing deputy. She has published memoirs, several dramas, essays, translations from such authors as Marcel Proust and Flaubert, and a biography of the poet and essayist Alessandro Manzoni. She died of cancer on October 7, 1991.