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Corrado Alvaro (15 April 1895 – 11 June 1956) was an Italian journalist and writer of novels, short stories, screenplays and plays. He often used the verismo style to describe the hopeless poverty in his native Calabria. His first success was Gente in Aspromonte (Revolt in Aspromonte), which examined the exploitation of rural peasants by greedy landowners in Calabria, and is considered by many critics to be his masterpiece.
He served as an officer in the Italian army during World War I. After being wounded in both arms, he spent a long time in military hospitals. After the war, he worked as a correspondent in Paris (France) for the anti-Fascist paper Il Mondo of Giovanni Amendola. In 1925, he supported the Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals written by the philosopher Benedetto Croce.
In 1926 he published his first novel L'uomo nel labirinto (Man in the Labyrinth), which explored the growth of Fascism in Italy in the 1920s. A staunch democrat with strong anti-Fascist views, Alvaro's politics made him the target of surveillance of Benito Mussolini's Italian Fascism regime. He was forced to leave Italy and during the 1930s he travelled widely in western Europe, the Middle East, and the Soviet Union. Journeys he later recounted in his travel essays. L'uomo è forte (1938; Man Is Strong), written after a trip to the Soviet Union, is a defence of the individual against the oppression of totalitarianism.
After World War II Alvaro returned to Italy. He again worked for prominent daily newspapers as a special correspondent, theatre and film critic, and editor. He was elected secretary of the Italian Association of Writers in 1947, a post he held until his death in Rome in 1956. He is buried in Vallerano.
In 1951 he won the Strega Prize (Premio Strega) – Italy's most prestigious literary award – for his novel Quasi una vita. Alvaro is noted for his realistic, epic depictions of the Italian poor. His later work portrayed the contrasts between a yearning for the simple, pastoral way of life, and the aspiration to achieve material success that attracts people to the city. He died in Rome.
He was one of the first authors to mention the 'Ndrangheta – the mafia-style criminal association in his native Calabria – in several short stories and in an article published in the Corriere della Sera in 1955. The pentiti's contribution to conceptualization of the mafia phenomenon, by Letizia Paoli, in The New European Criminology (Vincenzo Ruggiero, Nigel South, Ian R. Taylor eds., Routledge, 1998 ), p. 272
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