Umberto Eco

Author

Umberto Eco was an Italian novelist, literary critic, philosopher, and semiotician whose erudite, labyrinthine fiction made him one of the most celebrated European intellectuals of the twentieth century. Born in Alessandria, Italy, in 1932, he studied Medieval Philosophy at the University of Turin and became one of the world's leading... authorities on semiotics — the study of signs and symbols. He was a professor at the University of Bologna for decades. Eco's novels include The Name of the Rose (a medieval murder mystery set in a monastery that became an international bestseller and was adapted into a film starring Sean Connery), Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before, Baudolino, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, The Prague Cemetery, and Numero Zero. Baudolino follows a liar and adventurer in twelfth-century Constantinople whose tall tales blur the boundary between history and invention. Eco died in 2016 at the age of eighty-four. His audiobooks and books offer listeners and readers intellectual adventure fiction of the highest order — novels where medieval philosophy, detective plotting, and dazzling erudition combine into stories that are both demanding and irresistible. Read more Show less