Primo Levi

Primo Levi was born in 1919 in Turin, Italy, into a liberal Jewish family. A chemist by training who graduated from the University of Turin, he survived 11 months as prisoner 174517 in Auschwitz (1944–1945), which inspired his renowned memoir If This Is a Man (1947). He worked for decades in the paint industry before retiring to write full-time, producing acclaimed works like The Periodic Table (1975), a collection of autobiographical stories hailed as the best science book ever. Biography.com