Ignazio Silone

The reception of Ignazio Silone's works in the United States has moved in a horizon of both literary and political interest ever since the double edition of the fictional debut Fontamara (Harrison Smith & Robert Haas, and Random House, 1934). The epic of the "cafoni" by Silone, then a refugee in Switzerland for anti-fascist activities, helped shed light on the distortions of the Mussolini's regime, still not openly opposed by the US government, a year before the Italian colonial invasion of Ethiopia. Colonial war is among the central themes of Wine and Bread, then under the title Bread and Wine, promptly published in North America in the same year as the volume in Italian, by two different publishers again (Harper & Brothers, and New American Library, 1937), as well as in a Canadian edition (Saunders). While the reissues of the two novels followed one another, The School of Dictators (Harper & Brothers, 1938) also appeared in New York, consolidating Silone's reputation as an anti-fascist intellectual.

During World War II, despite the drastic reduction in translations of new Italian titles, Silone was the only writer along with Luigi Pirandello to be published in the United States, with The Seed under the Snow (Harper & Brothers, 1942), which was also the debut of Frances Frenaye as translator. Meanwhile, the writer was directing from Switzerland the Foreign Center of the Italian Socialist Party, thus coming into contact with US trade unions, administrations and intelligence services, which Silone intended to influence with a view to future post-war policies directed at Italy.

In the postwar period, alongside with reissues and new translations of Fontamara and Bread and Wine by various publishing houses, Harper & Brothers continued to secure the importation of the new volumes written by Silone, such as And He Hid Himself (1946), A Handful of Blackberries (1953) and The Secret of Luca (1958), all translated by Darina Laracy, the writer's wife. Back in Italy, from 1956 Silone directed with Nicola Chiaromonte the magazine Tempo presente: informazione e discussione, an emanation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, founded in 1950 in West Berlin with openly anti-communist aims. In 1966, a New York Times investigation shed light on the financiers of the CCF, officially supported by the Ford Foundation, but actually maintained by the CIA (the director himself, Melvin Lazky, was an agent). The magazine's first series closed in 1968.

During the 1960s, the US publishing market had meanwhile welcomed The Fox and the Camellias (1961) and the political reflections of Emergency Exit (1968), also published by Harper (which had become Harper & Row since 1962, after merging with Row, Peterson & Company). The same house issued The Story of a Humble Christian in 1970, edited by a renowned translator as William Weaver; meanwhile, the reissues and the new versions of the volumes by Silone had not stopped. By the mid-1970s, Silone was firmly established the deep-impact canon of Italian language school teaching in the United States.

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