20 Facts About Ignazio Silone

For many years an anti-fascist exile abroad, Silone participated actively and in various phases of Italian politics, animating the cultural life of the country in the post-war period.

Ignazio Silone was among the founders of the Italy's Communist party in 1921; he was later expelled for his dissidence with the Stalinist party line, and moved to democratic socialist positions.

Ignazio Silone was born in a rural family, in the town of Pescina, near L'Aquila, in the Abruzzo region.

In 1917, Ignazio Silone joined the Young Socialists group of the Italian Socialist Party, rising to be their leader.

Ignazio Silone was a founding member of the breakaway Communist Party of Italy in 1921 and became one of its covert leaders during the Italian fascist regime.

Ignazio Silone left Italy in 1927 on a mission to the Soviet Union and settled in Switzerland in 1930.

Ignazio Silone suffered from tuberculosis and severe clinical depression and spent nearly a year in Swiss clinics; in Switzerland, Aline Valangin helped and played host to him and other migrants.

Ignazio Silone became an Office of Strategic Services agent under the pseudonym of Len.

Ignazio Silone returned to Italy only in 1944, and two years later he was elected as a PSI deputy.

In 1948, Ignazio Silone was a founder of the breakaway Union of Socialists, succeeding Ivan Matteo Lombardo as the party's leader in June 1949.

Saragat encouraged Ignazio Silone to stand for the Senate on the PSDI list in the 1953 Italian general election.

In 1967, with the discovery that the journal received secret funds from the United States Central Intelligence Agency, Ignazio Silone resigned and devoted all his energies to writing novels and autobiographical essays.

In 1969, Ignazio Silone was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, which goes to writers who deal with the theme of individual freedom and society.

Ignazio Silone defined himself as a "Christian without church and socialist without party", and is considered the archetypical Italian anti-fascist.

In 2003, Elizabeth Leake put forward the thesis, based on the work of Biocca and Canali, that Ignazio Silone would have invented his own image, his identity, and life, accusing him of having been a false-socialist spy for the police and then a false-communist spy for the fascists.

Abroad, Ignazio Silone remained appreciated, and was defended by the likes of Christopher Hitchens.

Biocca and Canali's work was criticized by Indro Montanelli, and in articles and essays that appeared in La Stampa and in Corriere della Sera, as well as interviews with the likes of Norberto Bobbio, among others, who argued that the accuses first put forward by Biocca and Canali against Ignazio Silone were done either in bad faith or in good faith but with mediocre scholarship.

Ignazio Silone was a complicated man, troubled by doubts, examinations of conscience, introspective analyses, feelings of guilt: qualities and virtues that would have made him a great writer, rather than a political leader.

Ignazio Silone was married to Darina Laracy, an Irish student of Italian literature and journalist.

Three of Ignazio Silone's poems were included by Hanns Eisler in his Deutsche Sinfonie, along with poetry by Bertolt Brecht.