This book presents a collection of twelve essays on the interplay between individual lives and life-writing and the wider social and political history of Italy. It focuses on well-known writers and their varying anxieties about autobiographical writing.

1. Introduction General Issues and Signal Cases 2. The Public and the Private in Modern Italian Literature: The Case of Montale 3. The Battle of the Biographers: Primo Levi and 'Life—Writing' D'Annunzio and Other Fin de siècle 4. Enrico Nencioni: An Italian Victorian 5. Pescara and the Abruzzo in the Imagination of Gabriele D'Annunzio 6. British Material for the Biography of a Tuscan: Llewelyn Lloyd (1879-1949) 7. Italo Svevo: Journalism and the Life of a Writer Self-Images in Fascist Culture 8. Intellectual (Auto-)Biography in Bontempelli 9. Italian War—Correspondents and The Spanish Civil War: Propaganda and Autobiography Autobiographical Strains in Contemporary Italian Writing 10. Concessions to Autobiography in Calvino 11. Umberto Eco: Autobiography into Romance 12. The Dummy Interlocutor and Oriana Fallaci's Self-Projection in La rabbia e l'orgoglio