Corrado Alvaro

Corrado Alvaro (15 April 1895 – 11 June 1956) was an Italian journalist and writer of novels, short stories, screenplays and plays. He often used the verismo style to describe the hopeless poverty in his native Calabria. His first success was Gente in Aspromonte (Revolt in Aspromonte), which examined the exploitation of rural peasants by greedy landowners in Calabria, and is considered by many critics to be his masterpiece. He was born in San Luca, a small village in the southernmost region of Calabria. His father Antonio was a primary school teacher and founded an evening school for farmers and illiterate shepherds. Alvaro was educated at Jesuit boarding schools in Rome and Umbria. He graduated with a degree in literature in 1919 at the University of Milan and began working as a journalist and literary critic for two daily newspapers, Il Resto di Carlino of Bologna and the Corriere della Sera of Milan.

He served as an officer in the Italian army during World War I. After being wounded in both arms, he spend a long time in military hospitals. After the war he worked as a correspondent in Paris (France) for the anti-Fascist paper Il Mondo of Giovanni Amendola. In 1925, he supported the Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals written by the philosopher Benedetto Croce.

In 1926 he published his first novel L'uomo nel labirinto (Man in the Labyrinth), which explored the growth of Fascism in Italy in the 1920s. A staunch democrat with strong anti-Fascist views, Alvaro's politics made him the target of surveillance of Mussolini's Fascist regime. He was forced to leave Italy and during the 1930s he traveled widely in western Europe, the Middle East, and the Soviet Union. Journeys he later recounted in his travel essays. L'uomo è forte (1938; Man Is Strong), written after a trip in the Soviet Union, is a defense of the individual against the oppression of totalitarianism.

After World War II Alvaro returned to Italy. He again worked for prominent daily newspapers as special correspondent, theater and film critic, and editor. He was elected secretary of the Italian Association of Writers in 1947, a post he held until his death in Rome in 1956. He is buried in Vallerano.