The genesis of Primo Levi’s firstborn book

Abstract

Primo Levi’s literature leads us to his emprisonnement in one of the Nazi concentration camps during the second World War. The Italian chemist of Jewish origin lives for almost a year as a prisoner of the Germans in the Monowitz camp (Auschwitz III), and survives, according to himself, thanks to a series of factors that combined and determined his return back home. His literature is born precisely from this experience: the memory and the need to narrate, allied to his training as chemist and to his humanist and scientific mind, are the starting point of a work that will decisively mark the twentieth century and make him one of the leading Italian authors from the Novecento. This article intends to expose the genesis of Primo Levi’s literature, addressing the first texts written by the author between 1945 and 1947, the year of the first edition of “Is this a man?”, and to discuss the history of the first publication by the great publisher Einaudi in 1958.