Corrado Alvaro was born in the small town of San Luca, Calabria in 1895, and his father was a primary school teacher. When he was ten, he was sent to the Jesuit College in Frascati where he mixed with the scions of the upper classes of Rome. In 1910 he was expelled for reading a banned work, Carducci's Hymn to Satan, but he was already well-read and had studied avidly, even producing his first poetry. By 1913 he had completed his studies in Catanzaro in Calabria, where he lived until 1915 when he enlisted in the army. He was badly wounded in 1916, and after this he started his precocious career as a journalist, rising to editor of Il Resto del Carlino and then moving to Milan to work for Corriere dells Sera in 1919. He had married Laura Babini the previous year, which would prove to be a long and successful "literary" marriage, as she defined it. In 1921 he became the foreign correspondent of Giovanni Amendola's Il Mondo in Paris, and in 1925 he signed Benedetto Croce's Manifesto of the Antifascist Intellectuals. His literary career advanced until 1951, when he won Italy's most prestigious literary prize, the Premio Strega, with his novel Almost a Life. In 1954, he fell ill with stomach cancer which spread to his lungs, and in 1956 he died at his home in Rome where he left behind several unfinished novels.