Sharing an allegiance to socialist ideology with the writers Cesare Pavese and Elio Vittorini, he worked as a militant journalist for the communist newspaper
L'Unità and also contributed to
Il Politecnico. Much later, between 1959 and 1966, he served as codirector with Vittorini of the journal
Il menabò.
Between the summer of 1945 and the spring of 1949 Calvino wrote many short stories. Thirty of them were eventually collected in the volume Ultimo viene il corvo (The Crow Comes Last, 1949). Twenty of these stories were translated in Adam, One Afternoon, and Other Stories (1957). The subject matter of the stylistically disparate tales is the war and Fascism, often seen through the eyes of unreliable narrators. Evidently having espied a disturbing undercurrent of discontent in postwar Italian society, Calvino examines the ideological fervor of his day and a growing conservative trend among the lower middle class.
A single-minded perspective emerges from these stories of strife and difficulty in postwar Italy. Through the filter of intellectual detachment he dispassionately draws fragments of reality, evoking scenes not so much to portray human passions but to depict a reconstruction of social relationships.
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