Ugolini, Amadeo

Born 1896 in Constantinople; died May 6, 1954, in Turin. Italian writer. Member of the Italian Communist Party from 1937.

Ugolini began his literary career in 1929 with the publication of The Carriage of Fools, a novel. In 1934 appeared a collection of his short stories, The Lantern, in which the heroes were the poor people of Italy, whom Ugolini portrayed as leading a life of almost total deprivation. An activist as well as a writer, Ugolini took part in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). He was subsequently sentenced to prison by an Italian fascist tribunal for his political activities. Released in 1943, after the fall of Mussolini, Ugolini joined the partisan movement in Liguria during the German occupation (1943–45), becoming a member of the Committee of National Liberation in that region. After the war, Ugolini became the editor of the Milan edition of L’Unitá and contributed to the Communist press.

Ugolini was a master of the short story. The stories in the collection Ten Poems in Prose (1949), as well as the novels A Man Like All Men (1946) and Ten Cents’ Worth of Tobacco (1950), deal with the resistance movement. A neorealist, Ugolini wrote about the Italian people’s struggle against fascism and for peace and social reform. Marta Settles on the Border, a novella, was published in 1956.