When Beppe Fenoglio died in 1963 at the age of forty, he had published only a collection of short stories, I ventitrè giorni della città di Alba (The Twenty-three Days of the City of Alba, 1952), and two novels, La malora (1954; translated as Ruin, 1992) and Primavera di bellezza (Springtime of Beauty, 1959). At the time of his death, he was known only to a small circle of Italian readers. With the subsequent publication of other writings, he has become one of Italy's major postwar writers.

Isolated and reluctant to conform to the literary establishment, Fenoglio remained committed to linguistic experimentation, hoping to reinvigorate what he regarded as the sterile and rhetorical Italian language. He viewed his work as a translator as a means of experimenting with language and style, and his intense love for English literature had an enormous impact on his writings. A large share of Fenoglio's work...