How It All Started

Abstract

To borrow Levi’s own opening words in his Preface to Se questo è un uomo (Survival in Auschwitz), it was “per mia fortuna” that, in the fall of 1988, I received a phone call from Warren Slesinger, who at that time was acquisitions editor of the University of South Carolina Press. He was seeking the names of some recent prominent Italian writers whose works would be of interest to the American reading public. Besides Cesare Pavese and Alberto Moravia, he told me that, offhand, he could not recall the names of other modern Italian writers. The first two names that quickly came to mind to suggest to him were those of Italo Calvino and Primo Levi. His immediate response to the name of Primo Levi was “Why didn’t I think of him?” And then came the surprise. What I thought was just a call of inquiry resulted in my being asked if I were interested in submitting a proposal for a book to add to the Press’s series “Understanding Modern European and Latin American Literature,” the companion to the “Understanding Contemporary American Literature” series.