Tommaso Landolfi

Tommaso Landolfi was born in Pico in 1908. He was an Italian writer and translator active on the Italian literary scene since the 1930s. Some of his most successful short stories were published in the United States in collections specifically created for American readers, while his essays, plays and novels were never published overseas.

Landolfi first landed in the United States in 1950, when his short story Cancroregina, translated by Jack Murphy, was included in the collection An Anthology of New Italian Writers published by Margaret Caetani and distributed by New Directions. 

In the late 1950s New Directions editor James Laughlin read the short story Gogol's Wife in the British magazine Encounter and decided to publish Gogol's Wife, & Other Stories (New Directions, 1963). The collection included nine short stories by Landolfi: Gogol's Wife, Pastoral, Dialogue on the Greater Harmonies, The Two Old Maids, Wedding Night, The death of the King of France, Giovanni and his wife, Sunstroke and A Romantic's letter on Gambling, translated by Rosenthal, Young and Longrigg and drawn from the Italian collections Dialogo dei massimi sistemi (Fratelli Parenti, 1937), La Spada (Vallecchi, 1944), Le due zitelle (Bompiani, 1946) and Ombre (Vallecchi, 1954). Susan Sontag wrote a lengthy review of the book in The New York Times, comparing Landolfi's work to Borges’ and Isak Dinesen’s, disagreeing with the more common comparison with Kafka.

In 1971, The Dial Press published the collection Cancerqueen, and other stories, favorably reviewed by the American writer Leonard Michaels in The New York Times and by Patricia M. Gathercole in Studies in Short Fictions. Unlike Sontag, both reviewers detected Kafkaesque reminiscences in Landolfi's stories and drew attention to possible similarities with Edgar Allan Poe for «a kind of mysterious or even perverse romanticism» (Gathercole, 1964, p. 14). Gathercole pointed out the stylistic complexity of Landolfi's short stories, and James Laughlin shared this view when he refused, in 1964, to publish the unusual diary Rien Va (Vallecchi, 1963), considering it too subtle in content for the American public. Likewise, La Biere Du Pecheur (Vallecchi, 1953) and Des Mois (Vallecchi, 1967) were not published.

Landolfi's short stories continued to appear in American anthologies in the decades following their first publication. The last short story issued in the United States was Little Animals, in Great Italian Short Stories of the Twentieth Century (Dover Publications, 2013).