Yet he is also a cosmopolitan intellectual whose personality and work are well known throughout the world. The enormous success of his novels, the first two in particular, has made him perhaps the most influential of contemporary European intellectuals. As such, he has restored Italy and its intellectual tradition to a position of prominence in European cultural life.
Eco's novels represent only a fraction of his output and cannot be separated from his work as a philosopher, historian, literary critic, and aesthetician. His novels issue from and elaborate upon themes that are treated extensively in his other writings. Accordingly, anyone who wishes to study Eco as a novelist cannot afford to ignore his critical and theoretical work.
Umberto Eco was born at Alessandria, in Piemonte, on 5 January 1932. His father was an accountant at a bathtub manufacturer; one grandfather was a typographer and the other a tailor. The first in his family to attend a university, he studied at the University of Turin, graduating in 1954 with a degree in philosophy. At Turin he came under the lasting influence of the philosopher Luigi Pareyson, under whose guidance he wrote his thesis, which became his first published book, Il problema estetico in San Tommaso (1956; translated as The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, 1988).
This is a free page. This page contains 200 words. This
biography contains 6,137 words (approx. 20 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Umberto Eco Access Pass.
