P. M. Pasinetti

Pier Maria (P.M.) Pasinetti (born 24 June 1913, Venice, Italy; died 8 July 2006, Venice, Italy) was a novelist, professor and journalist.

P. M. Pasinetti went to the U.S. in 1935 to study literature and writing. He spent some time at the Louisiana State University and developed a friendship with "Southern Fellowship" poet and writer Robert Penn Warren.

Pasinetti’s first-published fiction in English appeared in the Southern Review. He had been publishing journalism pieces in Italy since the age of eighteen. His first book, three novellas, was published in 1942. During World War II, he held lectureships in Goettingen, in lower Germany, and in Stockholm.

After the war Pasinetti returned to the United States in 1946, teaching briefly at Bennington College. He studied with René Wellek and earned a doctorate in comparative literature (the first ever awarded) from Yale University. In 1949, he accepted a professorship in comparative literature and Italian at UCLA. Until his death in 2006, Pasinetti divided his time between Venice, Italy and Beverly Hills, California.

Pasinetti's family figures prominently in the artistic and cultural life of Venice. The famous Italian director Francesco Pasinetti was Pasinetti's older brother. Considered a seminal figure in Italian cinema F. Pasinetti played an important role in Italian cinema, writing the first history of Italian filmmaking in the late 1930s. The Pasinetti Prize is awarded annually at the Venice Film Festival. The Beverly Hills "Pasinetti House", built in 1959, was designed by Romanian-born, modernist architect Haralamb H. Georgescu, sometimes noted as Harlan Georgesco.

Pasinetti was a corresponding journalist for Il Corriere della Sera (1960s-1990s), writing the popular column "Dall'estrema America" ("From Farthest America"). Among his novels are: Rosso veneziano or Venetian Red (1957),Il ponte dell'Accademia or From the Academy Bridge (1968), Melodramma or Melodrama (1993). Students of comparative literature may recall the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, versions in the 1970s and 1980s, and most recently, 1997. Pasinetti served as an editor, with lead-anthologist Maynard Mack (Yale). Pasinetti helped found the Comparative Literature Department at UCLA, and is generally acknowledged as a pioneer in the cross-cultural study of literature in the original language. Active as a scholar well into his 90s, Pasinetti spoke on his bi-national identity as an Italian-American writer at Mt Holyoke College (April 2000): "From Venice to LA and Back: Cosmopolitanism, Writing, and Memory"

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