William Demby

William Demby first traveled to Italy as a serviceman in a segregated troop during World War II. He returned to Rome in 1947, inspired by the works of Giorgio De Chirico and by Roberto Rossellini's films. Soon after his arrival, he moved in with a group of artists and filmmakers that included Renzo Vespignani and Marcello Muccini. Demby completed his first novel in Italy, Beetlecreek, published in 1950 in English and in Italian, and began writing for English- and Italian-language periodicals, including The Reporter and Epoca. In this period, he also began translating Italian scripts into English and worked alongside his wife, Italian writer Lucia Drudi, on several screenplays; he served as an Assistant Director of Dialogue on Rossellini's Europa '51 and also dabbled in acting, making an appearance in Camillo Mastrocinque's film Il peccato di Anna / Anna's Sin (1953) and in Rossellini's short film "L'invidia" in The Seven Deadly Sins (1952). Published in 1965, Demby's most well-known novel, The Catacombs, features a Black author, Bill Demby, who is writing a novel within the novel while living in Rome with his Italian wife and son during the chaotic early 1960s. In the later 1960s, Demby returned to the United States and began teaching at the College of Staten Island, but he returned to his family in Italy often. He published Love Story Black in 1978 and began writing his final novel, King Comus, in the 1980s, which was published posthumously in 2017.