Italian · 1916–2000
Bassani grew up Jewish and comfortable in Ferrara, was barred from the tennis club and the public library by the racial laws of 1938, joined the resistance, and was jailed in 1943. Everything he wrote afterwards circles the same city and the same decade. He gathered his fiction into a single volume called The Novel of Ferrara, revising it obsessively; the six books in it share streets, families and a narrator who is never named. As an editor at Feltrinelli he did the literary world one enormous favour: he read a manuscript nobody wanted, recognised what it was, and published The Leopard. He also wrote poetry, taught, and led Italia Nostra in its campaigns to stop the destruction of historic city centres. De Sica's film of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis won the 1971 Oscar; Bassani hated it and had his name taken off it.