He studied chemistry at the University of Turin, graduating summa cum laude in 1942, notwithstanding the restrictions imposed by Mussolini's racial laws.

Mostly he wrote in the evenings and late into the night, although Levi said that the chapter The Canto of Ulysses was written almost entirely in a single, half-hour lunch break.

[7] In January 1947, the manuscript was initially rejected by Einaudi, with the writers Cesare Pavese and Natalia Ginzburg thinking it too early after the war for such an account.

Prior to this, however, five excerpts had been serialised, under its then title Sul fondo (in the Abyss) in a Turin Communist newspaper The People's Friend, between 29 March and 31 May 1947.

I wrote him an almost insolent letter: I warned him not to remove or change a single word in the text, and I insisted that he send me the manuscript of the translation in batches ...

It alludes to the treatment of people as Untermenschen (German for "sub-humans"), and to Levi's examination of the degree to which it was possible for a prisoner in Auschwitz to retain his or her humanity.

The last part of the poem, beginning meditate, explains Levi's purpose in having written it: to record what happened so that later generations will "ponder" (a more literal translation of meditare) the significance of the events he lived through.

Levi explained in his 1976 Appendix to the work: "I thought that my word would be more credible and useful the more objective it appeared and the less impassioned it sounded; only in that way does the witness in court fulfil his function, which is to prepare the ground for the judge.

"[14] In 1965 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation aired the 140-minute dramatic feature, "If This is a Man", George Whalley's adaptation of Stuart Woolf's translation.