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Primo Levi (31st July 1919 - 11th April 1987) was an Italian author of memoirs, short stories, poems and novels. He is typically known or cited for his profound accounts of the Nazi concentration camp he survived.
Primo Levi was born in Turin in 1919 into a liberal Jewish family. He graduated in chemistry from the University of Turin.
Arrested as a member of the anti-Fascist resistance during World War II, he was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 and spent ten months there before the arrival of the Red Army.
Of the 650 Italian Jews in his "shipment," Levi was one of the 20 who left the camps alive.
Levi's experiences in the death camp and in his subsequent return home through Eastern Europe are the subject of his two classic memoirs, If This Is a Man and The Truce (republished in the US as Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening).
He is also the author of two other highly praised memoirs, Moments of Reprieve and The Periodic Table. The Periodic Table (ISBN 0805210415) mentions that his scientific studies brought a welcome alternative to the constant stream of propaganda to which Italians were subjected. The novel If Not Now, When?, which tells the story of a band of Jewish WWII partisans wandering through Russia and Poland, won the distinguished Viareggio and Campiello prizes when it was published in Italy, and made Levi's name internationally known.
His best-known short stories are found in The Monkey's Wrench (1978), a collection of stories about work and workers told by a narrator resembling Levi himself.
Levi retired from his position as manager of SIVA, a Turin chemical factory, in 1977 to devote himself full-time to writing.
He died on 11th April, 1987, officially by suicide. Some have disputed this verdict and suggested that his manner of death, a fall down the stairwell in his apartment, may have been accidental; he was taking medication known to cause fainting at the time of his death.
These two works are published in one volume in the UK, separately in the US, and are Primo Levi's fullest, first accounts of his experiences related to World War II and the concentration camps.
Most of his later works return to the subject; only two are devoted to them.
Primo Levi wrote a lot of fiction, but only one novel:
Other works translated into English include:
At least three biographies of Primo Levi in English are now in print:
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