A Crucial Decade in the Career of Vasco Pratolini (1932-1942)

Abstract

By reason of his prominent position in contemporary Italian letters, Vasco Pratolini has been the subject of an extraordinarily large number of articles and critical essays. He has been frequently interviewed by the editors and critics of Epoca, L'Europeo, La Fiera Letteraria, and other Italian magazines. His novels and short stories have been translated into many languages, and articles on various aspects of his career have appeared in a host of foreign newspapers and journals. In examining the critical work that has thus far been done on Pratolini, one is struck by the discovery that although his life and works from 1945 to the present have been studied in great detail, and information regarding his childhood and adolescence in Florence during the 1920's is available in many published interviews and biographical sketches, his career during the 1930's and early 1940's has been almost completely neglected.' One finds occasional references to his youthful involvement with Fascism in the early 1930's, to his struggle with tuberculosis in 1935 and 1936, to