Italian · 1891–1937
Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist theorist, politician, and journalist who co-founded the Italian Communist Party. Arrested by Mussolini's fascist regime in 1926, he spent the rest of his life in prison, where he filled thirty-three notebooks with analyses of culture, politics, history, and philosophy. The prison destroyed his health — he died in 1937, shortly after release. His notebooks, published posthumously, transformed Marxist theory and founded cultural studies.