Italo Svevo

Italo Svevo (1861–1928) was an Italian-Jewish businessman who wrote novels, plays, and stories. Interested in Freudian theory, he wrote the novel Confessions of Zeno, which caught the eye of James Joyce. Zeno, the novel’s protagonist, was an avatar for Svevo himself, who also served as a model for Leopold Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses.