Italo Svevo

Italo Svevo was the pen name of Aron Hector Schmitz (1861–1928), an Italian and Austro-Hungarian writer who also worked as a businessman. He wrote novels, plays and short stories, and is best known for the modernist novel La coscienza di Zeno (1923), which became a widely admired classic of Italian literature. A close friend of James Joyce, he was considered a pioneer of the psychological novel in Italy. Other novels published under the name include A Life and As a Man Grows Older.