Umberto Eco

The first direct contacts between Umberto Eco and the American academic scene date back to 1969. By that year, two excerpts of his nonfiction production had already arrived in the U.S. publishing market, the first one from Diario minimo (Mondadori, 1963) in a special issue of Chelsea in June 1966 (18/19), and the second one from Apocalittici e integrati (Bompiani, 1964) in a Penguin volume entitled Italian Writing Today (1967). These were, evidently, publications that had little impact outside a small circle of readers. Far more decisive in 1969 was the Visiting Professor role at New York City University, to which Eco arrived from his chair of Semiotics at the Milan Polytechnic. Many stays at some of the most prestigious American universities, including Yale (1977 and 1980-81), Columbia (1978 and 1984) and Harvard (1993) followed from that year on until 2008.

The stay in the United States permitted a more rapid dissemination of Eco's critical works. If a seminal essay such as The Open Work (Bompiani, 1962), soon available in French (Seuil, 1965) and Spanish (Siex & Barral, 1966) had to wait until 1989 to be translated into English (Harvard University Press), in the mid-1970s a Theory of Semiotics (Indiana University Press) follows almost immediately the Italian edition of the Trattato di semiotica generale (Bompiani 1975). The most interesting case is perhaps 1979's The Role of the Reader (Indiana University Press), which welcomes essays from The Open Work, Apocalittici e integrati, Forme del contenuto (Bompiani 1971), Il superuomo di massa (Writers' Cooperative, 1976) and especially Lector in fabula, which had appeared in Italy that same year (Bompiani).

The great fortune with the American public came however in the following decade, with the narrative debut of The Name of the Rose (Bompiani, 1980), whose rights in the United States were acquired by a publishing giant such as Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (1983), that found a distinguished translator in William Weaver. Quickly becoming a bestseller, the novel was republished as early as the following year by Warner Books and adapted for cinema in 1986 by Jean-Jacques Annaud. Weaver translated also Eco's second novel, Foucault's Pendulum (Bompiani, 1988), the year after its Italian release, and again on behalf of Harcourt. Umberto Eco is among the most popular Italian writers on the US market today.

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