The Last Leopard: A Life of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

268 Pages·2007·15.273 MB·English

by  David Gilmour

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DAVID GILMOUR
Giuseppe Tomasi, Prince of
Lampedusa, died in 1957, the last
member of a great Sicilian family
which traced its ancestry to the early
Byzantine Empire. He died childless,
impoverished and unknown, leaving
the manuscript of a novel and some
stories. The following year that
novel, The Leopard, was published to
great acclaim in Italy and abroad,
and is now recognized as one of the
finest works of fiction of the
twentieth century.
For a quarter of a century Italian
‘and foreign scholars were denied
access to Lampedusa’s papers by his
widow. David Gilmour, however, has
recently been allowed to work in
Lampedusa’s last home in Palermo
where he discovered numerous
documents which had never been
seen by anybody since Lampedusa
himself. The many letters, diaries,
notebooks and photographs (together
with other papers which he dug out
of the ruins of the Palazzo
Lampedusa nearby) have enabled
the author to construct a lucid and
original biography. He describes
Lampedusa’s life from his childhood
during the Belle Epoque in Palermo,
through the inter-war years of travel
and marriage to a Baltic baroness, to
his final brief period of fulfilment as a
writer before dying of lung cancer at
the age of sixty.
AM
ISBN 0-7043~-2564~0
780704°3256

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THE LAST
LEOPARD

THE LAST
LEOPARD
A Life of Giuseppe di Lampedusa
DAVID GILMOUR
QUARTET BOOKS
London
New York
First published by Quartet Books Ltd 1988
A member of the Namara Group
27/29 Goodge Street, London W1P 1FD
Copyright © David Gilmour 1988
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Gilmour, David, 1952—
The last leopard: a life of Giuseppe di
Lampedusa.
1. Fiction in Italian. Tomasi di
Lampedusa, Giuseppe, 1896-1957
«title
boo 1912
ISBN 0-7043-2564-0
Typeset by Reprotype Limited, Peterborough, Cambs
Printed and bound by The Camelot Press Plc, Southampton