Italian · 1900–1978
Secondino Tranquilli lost his mother and most of his village to the Avezzano earthquake of 1915, joined the Socialists at seventeen, helped found the Italian Communist Party, and ran its underground press until he was expelled in 1931 for refusing to condemn Trotsky. He spent the fascist years in Switzerland writing novels about Abruzzo peasants that could not be published in his own country: Fontamara appeared in German in Zurich in 1933 and circulated across Europe while Italy banned it. After the war he broke with Communism publicly, contributed to The God That Failed, edited Tempo Presente with money that turned out to have come indirectly from the CIA, and sat in the Constituent Assembly. Archives opened in the 1990s showed he had also been an informer for the fascist police in the 1920s, a discovery Italian critics are still arguing about. The books were translated into more than forty languages.