Italian · 1861–1928
Ettore Schmitz sold marine paint for a living in Trieste, a Habsburg port where Italian, German and Slovene collided. He published two novels in the 1890s, sold almost nothing, and gave up fiction for twenty-five years. In 1907 he hired an English tutor at the Berlitz school: James Joyce. The two men swapped manuscripts. Joyce told him he was a real writer and later borrowed pieces of him for Leopold Bloom. When Svevo finally produced Zeno's Conscience in 1923 and Italian critics ignored it, Joyce sent it to Valery Larbaud and Benjamin Cremieux in Paris, and the French made him famous overnight at sixty-two. He wrote under a pen name meaning 'Italus the Swabian' — a joke about belonging to two countries and neither. He died in a car crash in 1928, asking for a last cigarette.