Primo Levi's Holocaust Writings

About Primo Levi

Primo Levi (1919–1987) was an Italian Jewish chemist and writer whose experience in Auschwitz produced one of the most important bodies of witness literature in any language — analytical, precise, morally serious, and written with the literary control of a great novelist despite being documented fact. Born in Turin, he was trained as a chemist and deported to Auschwitz in 1944; his chemistry training saved his life by earning him a position in the camp's synthetic rubber factory. After liberation he worked as a chemist and wrote his Auschwitz memoir If This Is a Man (1947, expanded 1958) in the months of his return. It was initially rejected by Einaudi before being published in a small edition; it slowly found its audience and is now widely regarded as the most important Holocaust account in literature. The Truce (1963) chronicles his year-long journey home; The Periodic Table (1975) — named the best science book ever written in a Royal Institution poll — links 21 chemical elements to episodes of his life; The Drowned and the Saved (1986) is his final, most philosophical engagement with the camps. He died in Turin in 1987; the circumstances (a fall down a stairwell in his apartment building) have been debated as possibly suicide, possibly accident.