A GREAT AND TERRIBLE WORLD

A group biography of F.T. Marinetti, Ezra Pound and Antonio Gramsci during the reign of Mussolini explores how the causes they championed - Futurism, Modernism, Communism, and Fascism - informed and clashed against one another in wild and spectacular ways.

Using a trove of unpublished, untranslated archival material, the book will be a piece of narrative non-fiction set across seven epic interwar years. Against the backdrop of Fascism's rise and fall, we see each of these men set out to transform the world: Gramsci working as a journalist and political activist tasked with adapting Communism for an Italian history, culture, and society; Marinetti promising to burn down the libraries and museums before realigning himself with Fascism in the hopes of making Futurism a State Art; and Pound, a poet turned propagandist, who uses his skills as a writer to churn out hundreds of articles and radio broadcasts supporting the Fascist cause.
This is a fascinating study of how and why this happened. Fascism seeped into their private and professional lives, but paradoxically it also inspired their finest intellectual and artistic works. Gramsci's 33 Notebooks were written while imprisoned and provide the first full-scale attempt to understand how Fascism came to be. Marinetti's Poema Africano was an epic inspired by the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 that showcases the poetic achievements and political failings of a Futurist movement that had lost its independence. And Pound's so-called Pisan Cantos, 3,500 lines written during his six months in a detention camp, are still an artistic triumph tarnished by the darkness of his antisemitic and treasonous vitriol.

Eric Bulson is a professor of Humanities at Claremont Graduate University. He's written four academic books, mostly for Cambridge University Press and much of his writing has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement.