Fernanda Pivano

Fernanda Pivano (18 July 1917 – 18 August 2009) was an Italian writer, journalist, translator and critic.

Born in Genoa in 1917, as a teenager she moved with her family to Turin where she attended the Massimo D'Azeglio Lyceum. In 1941 she received a bachelor's degree with a thesis on Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, which earned her a prize from the Center for American Studies in Rome. In 1943 her first translation, part of the Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, was published by Einaudi. In the same year she received a degree in philosophy.

In 1948, Pivano met Ernest Hemingway, resulting in an intense relationship of professional collaboration and friendship. In the following year Mondadori published her translation of A Farewell to Arms. She made her first trip to the United States in 1956. Throughout her professional life she has contributed to the diffusion of the most significant American writers in Italy, from the great icons of the Roaring Twenties, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker and William Faulkner, through the writers of the 1960s (Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti), to young writers of recent decades including Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, David Foster Wallace, Chuck Palahniuk and Jonathan Safran Foer. Pivano was also interested in African-American culture: for example she published many Italian versions of Richard Wright's books. In 1980 and again in 1984 Pivano interviewed Charles Bukowski at his home in San Pedro, California. These interviews became the basis for her book, Charles Bukowski, Laughing with the Gods first published in the USA by Sun Dog Press in 2000.

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