a booming economy, and Gadda used the experience for the fictional South American-cum-Brianza setting of La Cognizione del Dolore. After that, in the 1940s, he dedicated himself to literature. These were the years of fascism, which found him a grumbling and embittered pessimist. With age, his bitterness and misanthropy somewhat intensified. In Eros e Priapo (1945) Gadda analyzes the collective phenomena that favoured the rise of Italian Fascism, the Italian fascination with Benito Mussolini. It explains Fascism as an essentially bourgeois movement. Eros e Priapo was refused in 1945 by a magazine for its allegedly obscene content, and would only be published for the first time in 1967, by Garzanti. The 1967 edition, however, was expurgated of some of what Gadda considered the most heavy satiric strokes. The unexpurgated original 1945 edition will be published in 2013. In 1946, the magazine Letteratura published, in five episodes, the crime novel Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, which was translated into English as That Awful Mess on Via Merulana. It experiments heavily with language, borrowing a great deal from several Italian dialects. It is also notable for not telling whodunnit at the end. There is some debate amongst scholars as regards Gadda's sexual orientation. In his book on the homosexual painter Filippo De Pisis, writer Giovanni Comisso (also gay) described an evening in which he and De Pisis went for a beer with Gadda and philologist Gianfranco Contini, during the course of which Gadda asked De Pisis to summarize the various types of "irregular" love. According to Italo Calvino (Introduction to That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, 1984) Gadda was "a bachelor oppressed by a paralyzing shyness in any female presence." Certainly, his work demonstrates a strongly subversive attitude towards bourgeois values, expressed above all by a discordant use of language interspersed with dialect, academic and technical jargon and dirty talk. This is particularly interesting as the criticism of the bourgeois life comes, as it were, from the inside, with the former engineer cutting a respectable figure in genteel poverty. Gadda kept writing until his death, in 1973. The most important critic of Gadda was Gianfranco Contini. In 2017, the Swedish Academy published after 50 years the secret list of nominations for the 1966 Nobel Prize for Literature. Gadda was nominated for the first time by the Italo-American linguist and polyglot Mario Andrew Pei. Literary work La madonna dei filosofi (1931),