Influenced as much by Edgar Allan Poe, Guy de Maupassant, and Fyodor Dostoevsky as by St. Catherine of Siena, St. Teresa of Avila, and other Catholic mystics and recognized as an expressionist in the tradition of Giovanni Verga, Federigo Tozzi is increasingly considered--along with Luigi Pirandello and Italo Svevo--as one of the most original and important twentieth-century writers of Italy. His works form a bridge between the resistance to traditional narrative, found in the fragmentary style of Florentine avant-gardists such as Piero Jahier, Giovanni Boine, and Scipio Slataper, and the impersonal objectivity of nineteenth-century naturalism. The oneiric content and paratactic style of Tozzi's prose evokes comparison with Franz Kafka, while his more than 120 short stories, because of their formal innovation and choice of subject matter, are ranked alongside those of James Joyce.

Tozzi was born the last of eight children in Siena on 19 January 1883 to Federigo and Annunziata...