Giovanni Verga (1840-1922) was born into a bourgeois family in Sicily and began writing historical romances as a teenager. His later fiction was more naturalistic and dramatic in style and dealt largely with Sicilian rural life. He was introduced to the English-speaking world in the translations of D. H. Lawrence and is now considered to be one of the major Italian nineteenth-century authors. Harry McWilliam has translated Boccaccio's DECAMERON for Penguin.