Italian writer, a world-known award-winning journalist whose style is compared to Henry Kissinger. She is known for her many reports that range from economics to coverage of the Vietnam war. Impish and a spitfire, her international reputation borders on reverence.
The eldest of three girls, she recalls the war time of her childhood as a time of terror, huddling in a bunker while Americans bombed Florence. She cried – until her beloved dad delivered a slap and the admonition “A girl does not cry!” She remembers that slap like a kiss, a token of demanded strength. “Life is a tough adventure,” she says, “I am not generous with weak people.”
At 11, Fallaci worked as a courier for her dad, a leader of the local resistance movement in WW II. She learned to speak English while guiding downed-flyers and escaped POWs along twisted underground escape routes. By the time she was 16, she was a newspaper reporter.
After years of working as an apprentice journalist, she graduated to a raft of celebrity interviews from entertainment figures to politicians. Beginning in the late ’60s, she found fame in Italian magazines by exposing the underside of the Vietnam War, staring down Yasser Arafat, coaxing Indira Gandhi to open up and getting shot in the back covering the repression of the Left in Mexico City in October 1968. With a perverse fascination, she remained obsessed with the complexities of war. She volunteered for three tours of duty in Vietnam as a war correspondent and was on hand for the Persian Gulf. She keeps returning to war for the excitement, the exultation of defeating death. Fallaci’s “Interview With History” remains at the pinnacle of investigative journalism. Her novel, “Inshallah,” 1992, probes the minds of men seduced, made whole and destroyed by war.
In the early ’70s she went through her own private anguish about the conflict between a public and a private life, mourning a baby that she miscarried. At age 43, she fell in love with Alexandros Panagoulis, a dissident who’d been tortured and jailed for his attempted assassination of Greek dictator George Papadopoulos. Their affair lasted for three years, until 1976 when Panagoulis died in a mysterious auto accident. Fallaci closeted herself for the next three years, exorcising her pain by writing “A Man,” which became an international best-seller in 1979 and 1980.
She was awarded an honorary degree in literature by Columbia University 6/10/1977. Conducting her interviews in Italian, French, Spanish or English, Fallaci invariably begins each session with a provocative question, baiting her subject with the aim of getting beyond the surface. Bold and frenetic, she has gone toe-to-toe with some of the biggest tyrants on the globe, producing articles and books, daunted by nothing.
While working on the translation of “Inshallah” in early 1992, she found a lump in her left breast. In the summer she had a mastectomy and the cancer treatment of radiation. She continued smoking in defiance. With a lifetime of obsession with death, she is determined to die with dignity, herself.
Called the “tigress of the typewriter,” the Italian journalist succumbed to breast cancer on September 15, 2006 in Florence, Italy. She was 76.
Link to Wikipedia biography