[2] His most important teacher at the time was Augusto Monti, writer and educator, whose writing style attempted to be devoid of all rhetoric.

As a young man of letters, Pavese had a particular interest in English-language literature, graduating from the University of Turin with a thesis on the poetry of Walt Whitman.

After a few months in prison, he was sent into "confino", internal exile in Southern Italy, the commonly used sentence for those guilty of lesser political crimes.

After a year spent in the Calabrian village of Brancaleone, Pavese returned to Turin, where he worked for the left-wing publisher Giulio Einaudi as editor and translator.

Pavese was living in Rome when he was called up into the fascist army, but because of his asthma, he spent six months in a military hospital.

During his years in Turin, he was the mentor of the young writer and translator Fernanda Pivano, his former student at the Liceo D'Azeglio.

Depression, the failure of a brief love affair with the actress Constance Dowling, to whom his last novel and one of his last poems ("Death will come and she'll have your eyes"[6]) were dedicated, and political disillusionment led him to his suicide by an overdose of barbiturates[7] in 1950.

That year he had won the Strega Prize for La Bella Estate, comprising three novellas: 'La tenda', written in 1940, 'Il diavolo sulle colline' (1948) and 'Tra donne sole' (1949).

"[8] The circumstances of his suicide, which took place in a hotel room, mimic the last scene of Tra Donne Sole (Among Single Women), his penultimate book.