Italo Calvino was due to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard in 1985-86, but they were left unfinished at his death. The surviving drafts explore of the concepts of lightness, quickness, multiplicity, exactitude and visibility (Constancy was to be the sixth) in serious yet playful essays that reveal Calvinos debt to the comic strip and the folktale. With his customary imagination and grace, he sought to define the virtues of the great literature of the past in order to shape the values of the future. This collection is a brilliant precis of the work of a great writer whose legacy will endure through the millennium he addressed. Author Biography Italo Calvino, one of Italys finest postwar writers, has delighted readers around the world with his deceptively simple, fable-like stories. He was born in Cuba in 1923 and raised in San Remo, Italy; he fought for the Italian Resistance from 1943-45. His major works include Cosmicomics (1968), Invisible Cities (1972), and If on a winters night a traveler (1979). He died in Siena in 1985. Patrick Creagh won the John Florio Prize in 1972 for his translation of the Selected Poems of Giuseppe Ungaretti, and again in 1990 for Danube by Claudio Magris and Blind Argus by Gesualdo Bufalino.