Primo Levi

If This Is a Man was turned down by Einaudi and came out in 1947 from a small Turin press in an edition of 2,500, most of which did not sell. The book waited eleven years for its second life, when Einaudi took it in 1958. Primo Levi was a chemist, born in Turin in 1919, and had joined a partisan band in the mountains when he was picked up in December 1943. He was held at Fossoli and sent on to Auschwitz in February 1944, where a qualification in chemistry got him laboratory work through the last winter and probably kept him alive. Of the 650 Italians on his transport, about twenty came back. The Truce, published in 1963, is the other half of the story: nine months of wandering home through Poland, Byelorussia, Romania and Austria after the Red Army reached the camp in January 1945. He died in Turin on 11 April 1987 after a fall in his building, and whether it was an accident has been argued ever since.