La “Partita Hemingway”: Hemingway e l’editoria italiana dal dopoguerra a oggi

Abstract

During the Second World War, American literature in Italy became a cultural myth. Ernest Hemingway found himself at the core of such an ambivalent and contradictory myth: his books were a forbidden, subversive pleasure, something to be held secretly against the bans of the fascist regime. Hemingway’s works (and his own life) acquired a peculiar meaning for writers of the Left such as Elio Vittorini and Cesare Pavese, for politically engaged critics, as well as for the Italian publishing industry, which aimed at owning and controlling (and of course selling) his books. The history of the two most important Italian publishing houses of the period, Einaudi and Mondadori, is indissolubly intertwined with the reception of Hemingway’s works: it is not possible to trace the one without evoking the other. In the second half of the 1940s, Arnoldo Mondadori and Giulio Einaudi were opponents in what Einaudi himself defined the “Hemingway match”, a duel that neither of the two publishers was willing to lose for any reason. By using documentary sources, biographical works, as well as books tracing the history of the two publishing houses, this essay will recapitulate some salient steps of the critical reception of Hemingway’s works in Italy from the postwar period to the present day.