Fernanda Pivano

[...] "I was just a kid when I read Spoon River for the first time: Cesare Pavese brought it to me, one morning when I had asked him what was the difference between American and English literature.

In the same year Pivano married designer and architect Ettore Sottsass and moved to Milan, where she would live for the rest of her life.

Pivano made her first trip to the United States in 1956 and throughout her professional life she contributed to the diffusion of the most significant American writers in Italy, from the great icons of the Roaring Twenties, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker and William Faulkner, through the writers of the 1960s (Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti), to young contemporary writers including Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, David Foster Wallace, Chuck Palahniuk and Jonathan Safran Foer.

These interviews became the basis for her book, Charles Bukowski: Laughing with the Gods first published in the United States by Sun Dog Press in 2000.

In the summer of 2001 Pivano toured Northern America with director Luca Facchinito to film the documentary A Farewell to Beat – a celebration of the Beat Generation featuring notable American writers, including Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis and Lawrence Ferlinghetti written by Andrea Bempensante.