Italian author and chemist Primo Levi (1919-1987) was considered one of the foremost writers of concentration camp literature. He recounted with objective, scientific precision and detail the horrors of his year spent in Auschwitz. His focus, in life and in literature, was to promote understanding through memory and testimony, to respond to the "greatest crime of the century" with intelligence and humanity.

Primo Levi was born in Turin, Italy, on July 31, 1919 to an intellectual Jewish family. Levi's grandfather was an engineer, as was his father, Cesare Levi, who encouraged his son's interests in a wide variety of cultural pursuits, giving him access to a well furnished home library. The father-son relationship was complex in that Levi's introverted personality often contrasted with his father's more extroverted, exuberant nature. In any case, Levi recognized in his father the man responsible for his great interest in the arts, literature, and particularly...