This now classic work--the only monograph to have emerged from the original Workerist tradition--reconstructs the relations between literary production and the image of the 'people'. The issues it confronts are some of the most central to post-War Italian history as well as to forms of populism that have had such a spectacular resurgence in recent years. Asor Rosa, one of the central figures of the heretical Marxist traditions of Operaismo (Workerism)--alongside Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri--first coming to light in the hugely influential journals, Quaderni Rossi (Red Notebooks), Classe Operaia (Working Class) and Contropiano (Counter-plan), turns his attention here to the formation of a modern national tradition in Italy, the genesis of Italian Marxist historicism, Gramsci, the relationship between Fascism and the Left, militant anti-fascism--and does so through a detailed reconstruction and critique of some of the central figures of modern Italian literature, from Giovanni Verga to Carlo Cassola and Pier Paolo Pasolini. In this book, considered to be one of the books that prepared the ground for the 'long 1969' in Italy, which can be said to have lasted throughout the 1970s, Asor Rosa takes a strongly critical standpoint, his explicit intention is to demystify the myth of populism.