Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), one of the great Italian writers of the twentieth century, was a poet, novelist and diarist. Born near Turin, he first rose to prominence as a transltor and critic of American literature. In 1936, he published the first of two editions of Work's Tiring(Lavorare stanca), an extraordinary collection of narative poems, or 'poem-stories' as he called them, and then turned most of his energy to fiction. By 1950 he had published nine short novels that Italo Calvino called 'the most dense, dramatic, and homogeneous narrative cycle of modern Italy'. Pavese returned to poetry near the end of his life, and his late lyrics provide a haunting coda to his career. He killed himself in August 1950, a few weeks after receiving the Preio Strega, Italy's most prestigious literary prize.