LETTERS FROM PRISON, VOLUMES 1 AND 2
Antonio Gramsci, Frank Rosengarten (Editor),
Raymond Rosenthal (Translator)
Columbia University Press (1993)
(first published in 1947)

"Antonio Gramsci died quietly before daybreak on 27 April 1937 at the Quisisana clinic in Rome; he was forty-six years old. His sister-in-law, Tatiana Schucht, sat alone at his bedside....Those of Gramsci's political allies and Communist Party comrades who had not already been persecuted to their deaths or imprisoned by the Fascist regime, were widely scattered in exile or in hiding....

...He had been almost totally sequestered...since his arrest on 8 November 1926. Gramsci's death, it must have seemed at the time, had quite simply brought to its inevitable end a painful life of selfless commitment to the socialist vision; of great expenditure of energy on behalf of the Italian Communist Party...he helped found; of brave, unyielding, and very costly defiance of the Fascist dictatorship; and of failure and defeat.

...At the time of Gramsci's death nobody understood and appreciated more fully than Tatiana Schucht the value of the thirty-three notebooks that he left behind him....

...Tatiana Schucht placed the manuscripts in a bank vault in Rome while she set out to determine a safe way to send them to Moscow....The manuscripts eventually reached Moscow in the summer of 1938...After the war, the notebooks...were returned to Italy and eventually housed at the Gramsci Institute in Rome...." Antonio Gramsci, Letters from Prison, Volume I (1991 edition), Introduction, pp. 1-4

BOOK DESCRIPTION
BOOK NEWS
Arguably the most famous collection of letters in this century, the great Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci...wrote these letters while imprisoned by the Italian Fascists from 1926 until six days before his death in 1937. Personal and moving, they explore all manner of questions in history, sociology, philosophy, folklore, and literature—always within the overriding context of the isolation and harshness of prison life. The most complete and authoritative English edition, these two volumes contain 484 letters— including 28 that have never before been published in any collection—based on the Italian editions of 1965 and 1988....Volume 1 covers...1926 to 1930, and Volume 2...1931 to 1937.