Bread and Wine

When it first appeared in 1936, Bread and Wine stunned the world with its exposure of Italy’s fascist state, depicting that regime’s use of brute force for the body and lies for the mind. Through the story of Pietro Spina, who returns from fifteen years of exile to organize the peasants of his native Abruzzi into a revolutionary movement, this courageous work bears witness to the truth about any totalitarian regime—a warning as relevant today as it was in Mussolini’s Italy.
 
Surprisingly tender and rich in humor, this twentieth-century masterpiece brings to life priests and peasants, students and revolutionaries, simple girls and desperate women in a vivid drama of one man’s struggle for goodness in a world on the brink of war. Ranked with Orwell and Camus among writers who insisted upon linking the hope for social change with the values of political liberty, Silone is one of the major voices of our time, and Bread and Wine is his greatest novel. As Irving Howe notes in his Introduction, “Bread and Wine will speak to anyone, of whatever age, who tries sincerely to reflect upon man’s fate in our century.” 
 
Translated by Eric Mosbacher, with an Introduction by Irving Howe and an Afterword by Barry Menikoff

Ignazio Silone was the pseudonym of the Italian author Secondo Tranquilli. A founding member of the Communist Party of Italy, he later declared his opposition to Stalinism and was expelled from the organization. Much of his creative output after World War II was written in opposition to Communism, and in 1969 he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for his writing on individual freedom and society. By the time of his death in 1978, he had been nominated for the Nobel prize for literature 10 times.

Irving Howe (1920–1993) was distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of the City of New York and coeditor of Dissent magazine. His many publications include Thomas Hardy, Politics and the Novel, Culture and Politics in the Age of Emerson, and Socialism and America. His Selected Writings appeared in 1990.

Barry Menikoff is a professor of English and American literature at the University of Hawaii. He has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, and he is the author of Robert Louis Stevenson and “The Beach of Falesá.” He has lectured and taught abroad, and he has been a visiting professor at the University of Southern California, Georgetown University, and the University of Victoria (British Columbia).