Le Guépard
The first edition of Il Gattopardo was published in Milan in early November 1958. Giuseppe Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa, Duke of Palma di Montechiaro, had died on 23 July 1957, from a malignant lung tumor detected the previous April. He therefore never knew the fate of his book, whose fame spread as swiftly as his illness had. Apart from three short articles published in Genoa in the 1920s, he had published nothing, placing him alongside two other great “posthumous” writers of the twentieth century: Fernando Pessoa and Franz Kafka. An admirer of Stendhal and Byron, Lampedusa began working on his novel in late 1954. In June 1955 he turned to other projects, then resumed writing in November. He was thus nearly sixty when he wrote his masterpiece.
Its publication is owed to Giorgio Bassani (1916–2000), novelist and poet, who managed to place it with Feltrinelli after it had been rejected by Mondadori and Einaudi, the leading publishers of the day. Bassani was a friend of everyone of consequence in Italy: Giorgio Morandi, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alberto Moravia, and even the young Pasolini. The future preface-writer recounted how the manuscript reached him: “I received the typescript. It bore no signature. Yet as soon as I had savored the delightful sentences of the opening, I was certain it was serious work, the work of a true writer. That was enough for me. Reading it in full only confirmed my first impression. I telephoned Palermo at once. I thus learned that the author of the novel was none other than Giuseppe Tomasi, Duke of Palma and Prince of Lampedusa.”
From the moment of publication, the success was immediate. The novel won the Premio Strega in 1959 and was promptly translated into several languages: in France, Aragon wrote emphatically in Les Lettres françaises that “Le Guépard is a little more than a very fine book, it is one of the great novels of this century, one of the great novels of all time… the only Italian novel.” It was adapted for the screen by Luchino Visconti in 1963, starring Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale, and won the Palme d’Or at Cannes that same year. The dialogue for the French version was written by René Barjavel.
A fine copy.