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 in April. He therefore never knew of the fate of his novel, whose fame proved as sudden and rapid as his illness. Apart from three short articles published in Genoa in the 1920s, he had published nothing, resembling in this respect two other great “posthumous” writers of the twentieth century: Fernando Pessoa and Franz Kafka. Lampedusa, an admirer of Stendhal and Byron, began working on his novel at the end of 1954. In June 1955 he turned to other projects, then resumed writing in November 1955. He was thus nearly sixty when he wrote his masterpiece.

Its publication is owed to Giorgio Bassani (1916–2000), novelist and poet, who succeeded in placing it with Feltrinelli after it had been rejected by Mondadori and Einaudi, the leading publishers of the day. Bassani was friends with everyone who mattered 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 that this was serious work, the work of a true writer. I needed nothing more. 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.”

The novel’s success was immediate from the moment of publication. It won the Premio Strega in 1959, was translated into every language, and was adapted for the screen by Visconti in 1963.

In France, Aragon wrote emphatically in Les Lettres françaises: “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.”