A family tradition of devotion to science obliged him to enter the School of Agriculture at the University of Turin, where his father was a distinguished professor of tropical agriculture.
Calvino's studies were interrupted by twenty months of German occupation during World War II. When his parents were abducted by the Germans, their twenty-year-old son joined the Garibaldi Brigade, a partisan resistance group active in the Maritime Alps. His anti-Fascism, though, was due more to his tenaciously liberal upbringing than to political conviction. After the war he returned to the university and, taking advantage of special allowances made to wartime students, enrolled in the faculty of literature, graduating one year later with a thesis on Joseph Conrad.
Calvino began his writing career in the mid 1940s, at a time when Neorealism was becoming the dominant literary movement. The dilemma for the young author coming of age at this moment of cultural flux was whether to follow the accepted standard of social realism promoted by Marxist ideology or move beyond literary convention on his own. For a while Calvino was able to maintain a healthy balance and satisfy both his political commitment and evolving literary aspirations.
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