Umberto Eco
1 book analyzed
Biography
Umberto Eco (1932-2016) was an Italian semiotician, medievalist, literary critic, and philosopher who became the most commercially successful academic novelist of the twentieth century. He held the chair of semiotics at the University of Bologna for decades, published landmark academic works including A Theory of Semiotics (1976) and The Role of the Reader (1979), and only turned to fiction at age forty-eight. The Name of the Rose (1980) was his first novel. It sold over fifty million copies worldwide and was translated into more than forty languages — an unprecedented achievement for a book saturated with medieval Latin, Scholastic philosophy, and semiotic theory. Eco described the novel as a book 'in which the reader would find what he brings' — a detective plot for thriller readers, a philosophical argument for intellectuals, a historical panorama for medievalists.