He was born into a Jewish family settled in Piedmont. In 1941, he graduated as a chemist from the University of Turin, a profession he would later combine with his literary activity. After participating in the resistance in northern Italy, he was captured and deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Following the liberation of the camp in 1945, and after a hazardous journey through Eastern Europe, Levi returned to Turin, where he published his first account of the Nazi extermination camps, If This Is a Man (1947), a foundational book of concentration camp literature
Subsequently, The Truce (1963) and The Drowned and the Saved (1986) were published, two essential titles that complete the Auschwitz Trilogy. Among his works are also his five volumes of stories: Natural Histories, Structural Defect, The Periodic Table, Lilith and Other Stories, and Last Christmas of War.
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