A Need to Testify Portraits of Lauro de Bosis, Ruth Draper, Gaetano Salvemini, Ignazio Silone and an Essay on Biography
Iris Origo's last book A NEED TO TESTIFY, is a memoir of four friends who shared an anti-fascist commitment in Italy during World War II. Two of them, writer Lauor de Bosis and American monologist Ruth Draper, were lovers. The other two, historian Gaetano Salvemini and Ignazio Silone, journalist and author of Fontarama and Bread and Wine lived in exile. When the book was originally published in the early 1980s, New Statesman called it 'a sensitive and beautifully written book by a remarkable writer, and The New York Times felt that Origo's portrait of Silone was the best short study of that author ever written.
