In the 1950s, during the debates on Neorealism, Carlo Bernari saw his name associated with the main forerunners of the movement: Alberto Moravia, Gesare Pavese, and Elio Vittorini. In Carlo Bo's Inchiesta sul neorealismo (An Inquiry on Neorealism, 1951), Bernari clarified how and why his neorealism was "ante litteram" and different from the post-war memorialistic current.

Despite Bernari's reservations about being associated with the movement, most critics now agree with the poet Eugenio Montale, who was among the first to consider Tre operai, an incunabula of Neorealism. As critics reexamine the origins and the development of Neorealism as a literary and artistic trend, they are paying closer attention to its different components, exploring its connections to neorealistic cinema, the works written during the Fascist era from the early 1920s to 1945, the postwar novels that reconstructed the war period and the underground resistance to Fascism, and to the heterogeneous body...