Giuseppe Berto

Giuseppe Berto had a violent first approach to the United States: in 1943, as a volunteer soldier in Africa in the VI Black Shirts Battalion, he was captured by the Anglo-American forces and transferred to a prison camp in Hereford, Texas, where he remained until 1946. There, Berto wrote his first novel, Il cielo è rosso (Longanesi, 1947), reportedly using pieces of toilet paper as sheets. During a trip to Italy, James Laughlin, founder of New Directions, learned of the success of Berto's novel and its peculiar gestation. He immediately wanted to read it and was so impressed that he contacted the author to publish the novel in the United States. New Directions published The Sky is Red on September 30, 1948, with a translation by Angus Davidson. 

David McDowell, New Directions' publicity director, claimed that the publisher was using the largest budget since the beginning of its business to publicize The Sky is Red, and the novel was the publisher's first publication selected by the Book Find Club. Praised by Arthur Miller and Martha Foley, The Sky is Red was billed as “the best novel to come out of the war” (Berto, Correspondence) and placed on par with the works of Alberto Moravia and Elio Vittorini. However, some U.S. critics resented the work's anti-Americanism, judging negatively the absence of strong criticism of fascism within the novel. In addition, some saw in Berto’s style an unfortunate influence of Hemingway and Steinbeck. The Sky is Red nevertheless aroused great interest, and New Directions received several inquiries for the rights to turn the novel into a play (e.g., Taub in 1949 and Locascio in 1961). The film adaptation, on which Berto worked as screenwriter, was instead carried out by the Italian production company Acta Films, directed by Claudio Gora. The film, which was not particularly successful, was released in Italian theaters in 1950, and in the United States in 1952. The various reprints (New American Library, 1952; Greenwood Press, 1971) of The Sky is Red are a testament to its success. 

Berto's later works were also published in the United States by New Directions. The Works of God came out in 1950 (originally published by Macchia in 1948) and in 1951 The Brigand (Einaudi, 1951), both translated by Davidson. The former was less successful than The Sky is Red, probably because it focused on war themes at a time when the American readership seemed to be turning its interest elsewhere. The Brigand, on the other hand, was rather successful: it was selected as a finalist in the Book of the Month Club and was republished in 1953 as a Signet Book by New American Library. US critics pointed out the social themes in the work, which some felt interfered "with the full psychological realization of the protagonists" (Ragusa, 1952, pp. 74-75). 
In 1954 one of his short stories ("Aunt Bess, in Memoriam," translated by Ben Johnson), was included in Modern Italian Short Stories (Simon and Schuster), and a few years later the short stories "Midnight Trysts" and "Midnight Appointments" were included in Stories of Modern Italy from Verga, Svevo and Pirandello to the Present (The Modern Library, 1960). 

In 1959 Berto fell ill with neurosis and did not take up writing again until years later. His masterpiece Il male oscuro (Rizzoli, 1964) was considered by Laughlin "an extraordinary book" (Berto, Correspondence). In 1964 New Directions expressed a desire to bring this novel to the United States as well, but Knopf beat it to it, and in 1966 published the novel, translated by William Weaver, under the title Incubus. In the following years, Berto devoted himself mainly to screenplays, journalism, and other novels that were not published in the United States, before his passing in 1978.