The Last Leopard: A Life of Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

by David Gilmour (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2007

  $13.31

  David Gilmour's biography of Giuseppe di Lampedusa unearths the life story of the creator of The Leopard , one of the great novels of the twentieth century. A book whose imagery, once tasted, haunts the reader forever. The Leopard describes the golden era of the nineteenth-century Sicily in all its sensual, fading, aristocratic glory. But beneath the surface lurk Sicily's millenial contagions - corruption, brutality and inequality. Who wrote this masterpiece, this work of art? the answer is as unlikely as one might hope. This is a fascinating meditation on what it is that makes a writer.

• Used

  Paperback
  2003

  $3.25

  In 1957, Giuseppe Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa, the last member of a great Sicilian family, died childless, impoverished and unknown, leaving behind him the recently completed manuscript of a novel. The following year the novel, The Leopard , was published to great acclaim. For a quarter of a century Italian and foreign scholars were denied access to the reclusive writer's papers until, following a meeting with Lampedusa's adopted son, David Gilmour succeeded in gaining permission to work in the writer's last home in Sicily. There, and in the nearby ruin of the Palazzo Lampedusa, he found many letters, diaries, notebooks and photographs which had not seen the light of day since Lampedusa's death. In The Last Leopard , David Gilmour brings to life not only an enigmatic writer of genius, but the vibrant Sicily and Italy of his youth, the Europe of the inter-war years and the slow, careful distillation of an undoubted masterpiece.