A sweeping, definitive biography of the polarizing Italian writer whose infamous politics, relationship with Mussolini, and irrepresable knack for invention made him one of the most provocative artists and thinkers of his time. Curzio Suckert--best known by his pen name, Malaparte--was not only a literary master but one of the mystery men of twentieth-century letters. The son of a cosmopolitan German businessman and an Italian mother, Malaparte led a life that was intimately entwined from start to finish with the twentieth century's troubled history, and only recently has it become possible to begin to separate fact from the screen of fictions with which he continually surrounded himself. The diplomat and novelist Maurizio Serra tells the story of a precocious child who hurried to enlist in the French Army and endured the horrors of trench warfare in World War I. Taking up the pen of the journalist in the interwar years, Malaparte both allied himself and fell out with Mussolini,
