Pasolini Requiem

Book excerpt: Since its appearance in 1992, Barth David Schwartz's biography of Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) has been the standard reference and starting point for anyone embarking on a study of Pasolini in English, situating the multimedia artist within twentieth-century Italian and world culture. Pasolini was unique among his contemporaries--Federico Fellini, for example, didn't write novels, Giorgio Bassani did not direct films, and Eugenio Montale did not write popular journalism. Although Pasolini excelled at all of these genres, he was first and foremost a poet (see Chicago's bilingual edition of his selected poems from 2014). Whatever he was doing, Pasolini's poetry informed all aspects of his creative life, from his plays to his visual art, from his films to his political essays. In this second edition, which includes a new Afterword that contains material that has come to light since the early 1990s and revelations about Pasolini's last days, Schwartz introduces this multimedia artist to a new generation of scholars and students trying to negotiate the complexities of the Italian cultural landscape. As Susan Sontag wrote, Pasolini is "indisputably the most remarkable figure to have emerged in Italian Arts and letters since the Second World War." This new edition, revised and updated throughout, is a natural companion to our volume of poetry and, with the poems, will be a perennial seller for years to come.