Giuseppe Berto

Giuseppe Berto had a violent first approach to the United States: not yet a writer, but as a volunteer soldier in the VI Blackshirts battalion in Africa, in 1942 he was captured by the Anglo-Americans and carried to a prison camp at Hereford, Texas, where he remained until 1946. There, Berto wrote his first novel, Il cielo è rosso (Longanesi, 1947), using - if rumors are true - pieces of toilet paper as sheets of paper. Shortly after the novel's release, publisher James Laughlin, founder of New Directions, was in Italy. When he learned of the success of Berto's novel and its peculiar gestation, he wanted to read it and was so deeply impressed that he immediately contacted the author about publishing the novel in the States. New Directions published The Sky is Red on September 30, 1948, with a translation by Angus Davidson. 

David McDowell, New Directions’ publicity director, declared that the publisher was using the largest budget ever to promote The Sky is Red, and the novel was selected by the Book Find Club, a fact that had never happened before in New Directions' history. Praised by Arthur Miller and Martha Foley, The Sky is Red was billed as «the best novel to come out of the war» (Berto, Giuseppe. The Sky is Red : production and promotional materials) and likened to Alberto Moravia and Elio Vittorini's works. However, some American critics pointed out the novel's anti-americanism, blaming the absence of a strong disapproval to fascism in the novel. Moreover, some noticed in Berto's style an unhappy influence of Hemingway and Steinbeck. Anyway, The Sky is Red sparked a great interest and many asked New Directions for the rights to realize a play (for instance, Taub in 1949 and Locascio in 1961).  The film adaptation, on which Berto collaborated as a screenwriter, was instead made by the Italian production company Acta Films, directed by Claudio Gora. The movie, which didn't reap a particular success, was released in Italy in 1950 and in the US in 1952. The success of The Sky is Red is also evidenced by the various reprints (New American Library, 1952; Greenwood Press, 1971).

Berto's later works were also published in the US by New Directions. The Works of God (Le opere di Dio, Macchia, 1948) was released in 1950, The Brigand (Il brigante, Einaudi, 1951) in 1951, both with translations by Angus Davidson. The American edition of The Works of God contained, in addition to the short novel that gave the work its title, three other short stories. The collection gathered less success than The Sky is Red, probably because it was focused on war themes at a time when the American public were turning its interest elsewhere. The Brigand, on the other hand, was successful: it was selected as a finalist by the Book of the Month Club, and reprinted as a Signet Book in 1953 by New American Library. The American critics pointed out the social issues present in the work, and someone considered them as an interference "with the full psychological realization of the protagonist" (Ragusa, 1952, pp. 74-75).

Berto's career was now well under way. In 1954, his short story Aunt Bess, In Memoriam, translated by Ben Johnson, was included in Modern Italian Short Stories (Simon and Schuster) and some years later his other short stories Midnight Trysts and Appuntamenti a mezzanotte were published in Stories of Modern Italy from Verga, Svevo and Pirandello to the Present (The Modern Library, 1960).

In 1959 Berto came down with neurosis. He started writing again just some years later. James Laughlin considered Berto’s masterpiece Il male oscuro (Rizzoli, 1964) «un libro straordinario» (Berto, Giuseppe. Correspondence, photograph). In 1964 New Directions expressed a desire to bring this novel to the United States as well, but in 1966 the work was published by Knopf under the title Incubus, with a translation by William Weaver. In the following years, Berto devoted himself mainly to screenplays, journalism and other novels that were not published in the United States. Berto died in 1978.

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