Umberto Eco (born January 5th 1932) is an
Italian medievalist,
semiotician,
philosopher,
literary critic and
novelist, best known for his novel
The Name of the Rose (
Il nome della rosa, 1980), an intellectual mystery combining
semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and
literary theory. His 1988 novel
Foucault's Pendulum has been described as a "thinking person's
Da Vinci Code".
[1] Eco is President of the
Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici,
University of Bologna, and an Honorary Fellow of
Kellogg College,
University of Oxford.
[2] He has also written academic texts, children’s books and many essays. He was also voted 2nd in
Prospect Magazine's 2005 global poll of the world's top 100 intellectuals.
[3] He was voted 14th in 2008.
Eco was born in the city of Alessandria in the region of Piedmont (northern Italy). 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 and interviews.[4] His family name is supposedly an acronym of ex caelis oblatus (Latin a gift from the heavens), which was given to his grandfather (a foundling) by a city official.[5]
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.[6] 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 important and influential component in Eco's future writing career. This was especially true after the publication of his first book in 1956, Il problema estetico in 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.[7] In 1992-1993 Eco was the Norton professor at Harvard University. On May 23, 2002, Eco received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Eco is a member of the Italian skeptic organization CICAP.[8]
