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WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
“Jean Mudge recounts a fascinating story that partakes of both Romantic
adventure and tough political resistance. She pays attention to de Bosis’s
intellectual and family background as well as to his work as poet and translator.
Above all, her work splendidly reconstructs, drawing on hitherto unread material,
his political development from initial fascist sympathies to a growingly anti-Mussolinian
position.”
— Piero Boitani, University of Rome “La Sapienza,” 2001 Lauro
de Bosis Lecturer, Harvard.
“This splendid work of research and scholarship
proves the fallacy of the false alternative, either fascism or communism.
The life of the courageous de Bosis demonstrates the presence of a liberal
alternative based not on political ideology but on Italian history and
its civic humanistic traditions. The book is full of telling details
and perceptive observations.”
— John Patrick Diggins, Distinguished Professor of History, Graduate Center,
City University of New York
“It’s unlikely that de Bosis will find
a more sympathetic or perceptive biographer. The range of research in
American and Italian libraries is impressive. Mudge sheds new light on
American-Italian relations in the 1920s; and she even shows an extraordinary
detailed knowledge of aviation technology in the period of de Bosis's
flight. I found myself muttering ‘brava’ time and again as
she made her way sure-footedly through perilous areas of Italian and
American history where it is all to easy to fall into error. I was struck,
as others will be, by the murky straits of the anti-Fascist resistance
through which de Bosis, like Ignazio Silone, had to pass. Both men came
to know the ‘grey’ areas of the period that we today find
so difficult to grasp and that those who come after us will find even
more elusive.”
— Robert Wohl, Professor of European History, UCLA
Lauro de Bosis in his Messerschmitt, D–1783
Roll your cursor over the
plane to see a close-up
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THE POET AND THE DICTATOR: LAURO DE BOSIS RESISTS FASCISM
IN ITALY AND AMERICA tracks the rise of a gifted American Italian poet to become a fierce antagonist
to Fascism and Mussolini in the 1920s. De Bosis, who played out his anti-Fascist
role in Rome and New York, sacrificed his life for this cause. But he left
an eloquent and potent legacy for his fellow Italians. His message remains
relevant today when individual freedom and democracy are still threatened around
the world.
