Umberto Fracchia

Umberto Fracchia (5 April 1889 – 5 December 1930) was an Italian writer.

He was intensely active professionally for slightly more than two decades, between 1908 and 1930. He began writing short stories at an early age, but built his career initially as a journalist and literary critic. During 1919/20 he broke into the movie business, directing several films in quick succession, before his professional focus returned abruptly to writing. Over the next decade, in parallel with his journalistic work, he published a succession of novels and short stories which achieved significant commercial success. He also, in 1925, launched La Fiera Letteraria, a broadly-based literary magazine which he ran successfully for a couple of years with a skeleton staff consisting principally of himself and his wife. Exhausted by the intensity of the work and the political pressure to which magazine publishers were subjected at the time, in 1928 he transferred management of the publication to Giovanni Battista Angioletti and Curzio Malaparte while, at this stage, retaining his financial interest in it. After his sudden death from heart disease at the end of 1930, Fracchia's work remained widely read in and beyond Italy for a number of years.