His family lived in Turin, where his father worked as registrar in the court system, and it is in that city that Pavese spent practically all of his life, where he completed his education and worked till his death for the Einaudi publishing house. But while Turin was the place of his existence, the countryside remained the space of his imagination and his memory.
As a student Pavese had a particular fascination for American culture, slang, and literature; he wrote his dissertation on the poetry of Walt Whitman. From 1931 to 1947 he translated many works from English into Italian, including Herman Mellville's Moby Dick (1932), Sherwood Anderson's Dark Laughter (1932), John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (1938), Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (1938), Charles Dickens's David Copperfield (1939), and William Faulkner's The Hamlet (1942). His translations, along with those of Elio Vittorini, introduced Italians to a literature different from the one canonized by a self-conscious tradition and reasserted by the Fascist regime for its own ideological purposes.
In 1935, accused of antifascist activities, Pavese was arrested and sent to Brancaleone Calabro, where he was forced to reside for ten months. By and large Pavese's maturation coincided with the suffocating dominance of the Fascist movement in Italian political and cultural life, thus imposing on him and other intellectuals the necessity of defining their own positions with regard to the regime.
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