Umberto Eco (born 1932) is an Italian medievalist, semiotician, philosopher, literary critic and novelist, best known for his novel The Name of the Rose (1980), an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory. His 1988 novel Foucault's Pendulum is also famous.
Eco is President of the Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici, University of Bologna, and an Honorary Fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford. He has also written academic texts, children’s books and many essays.
Eco was born in the city of Alessandria in the region of Piedmont. His father, Giulio, was an accountant before the government called upon him to serve in three wars. During World War II, Umberto and his mother, Giovanna, moved to a small village in the Piedmontese mountainside. Eco received a Salesian education, and he has made references to the order and its founder in his works.
His father was the son of a family with thirteen children, and urged Umberto to become a lawyer, but he entered the University of Turin in order to take up medieval philosophy and literature, writing his thesis on Thomas Aquinas and earning his Laurea in philosophy in 1954. During this time, Eco left the Roman Catholic Church after a crisis of faith.
After this, Eco worked as a cultural editor for the state broadcasting station Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI) and also lectured at the University of Turin (1956–64). A group of avant-garde artists – painters, musicians, writers – whom he had befriended at RAI (Gruppo 63) became an influential component in Eco's future writing career. This was especially true after the publication of his first book in 1956, Il problema estetico di San Tommaso, which was an extension of his doctoral thesis. This also marked the beginning of his lecturing career at his alma mater.
In September 1962, he married Renate Ramge, a German art teacher with whom he has a son and a daughter. He divides his time between an apartment in Milan and a vacation house near Rimini. He has a 30,000 volume library in the former and a 20,000 volume library in the latter.
In 1959, he published his second book, Sviluppo dell'estetica medievale, which established Eco as a formidable thinker in medievalism and proved his literary worth to his father. After serving for 18 months in the Italian Army, he left RAI to become, in 1959, non-fiction senior editor of Casa Editrice Bompiani of Milan, a position he would hold until 1975.
Eco's fiction has enjoyed a wide audience around the world, with good sales and many translations. His novels often include references to arcane historical figures and texts and his dense, intricate plots tend to take dizzying turns.
Eco employed his education as a medievalist in his novel The Name of the Rose, a historical mystery set in a 14th century monastery. Franciscan friar William of Baskerville, aided by his assistant Adso, a Benedictine novice, investigates a series of murders at a monastery that is set to host an important religious debate.
Eco is particularly good at translating medieval religious controversies and heresies into modern political and economic terms so that the reader can appreciate their substance without being a theologian. The Name of the Rose was later made into a motion picture starring Sean Connery.
The novel is a tribute to Jorge Luis Borges, represented in the novel by the blind monk and librarian Jorge. Borges, like Jorge, lived a life consecrated to his passion for books, and also went blind in later life.
Foucault's Pendulum, Eco's second novel, has also sold well. In a novel, three under-employed editors who work for a minor publishing house decide to amuse themselves by inventing a conspiracy theory. Their conspiracy, which they call ”The Plan”, is about an immense and intricate plot to take over the world by a secret order descended from the Knights Templar. As the game goes on, the three slowly become obsessed with the details of this plan. The game turns dangerous when outsiders learn of The Plan, and believe that the men have really discovered the secret to regaining the lost treasure of the Templars.
The Island of the Day Before (1994) was Eco's third novel. The book is about a man in the Renaissance marooned on a ship within sight of an island which he believes is on the other side of the international date-line. The main character is trapped by his inability to swim and instead spends the bulk of the book reminiscing on his life and the adventures that brought him to be marooned.
Baudolino, a fourth novel by Eco, was published in 2000. Baudolino is a peasant lad endowed with a vivid imagination and a most unusual capacity for learning the many languages which flourished in the Twelfth Century. When he is bought by the Emperor Frederic Barbarossa, his world expands: he is trained as a scholar and called upon to create authentic documents by diverse authors.
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2004), is Eco's fifth novel, about Iambo Bodoni, an old bookseller specialized in antiques who emerges from a coma with only memories to recover his past.
Eco's work illustrates the concept of intertextuality, or the inter-connectedness of all literary works. His novels are full of subtle, often multilingual, references to literature and history. For instance, the character William of Baskerville is a logically-minded Englishman who is a monk and a detective, and his name evokes both William of Ockham and Sherlock Holmes (by way of The Hound of the Baskervilles). Eco cites James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges as the two modern authors who have influenced his work the most.
