Translator's Note -- Preface -- Man as an End -- The Man and the Character -- Presence and Prose -- Recalling Time of Indifference -- Extremism and Literature -- Psychoanalysis -- Machiavelli -- Communism in Power and the Problem of Art -- Boccaccio -- Roman Walks -- Notes on the Novel -- The Short Story and the Novel -- Answers to Nine Questions on the Novel -- Alessandro Manzoni, or the Hyphthesis of a Catholic Realsim -- Eroticism in Literature -- Nothing Amen -- Dialogue on the Painting of Renato Guttuso -- The 'Vulgarity' of Giuseppe Verdi