I could not have better illustrations of the rôle played by autobiography in modern fiction than two recent novels--one by Michele Sapanaro, "Peccato" or "Six Months of Rustic Life"; the other by Frederigo Tozzi, "Con gli Occhi Chiusi" ("With Closed Eyes"). The first is a fresh, ingenuous book with a vein of romanticism which does not run into great effusion or great amativeness, in which is depicted the atmosphere, environment, and inhabitants of a small community in southern Italy, whither the writer has gone to visit his peasant brother and to recover from some of the wounds inflicted upon him in transformation from peasant to "gentleman." It is undoubtedly an elaborated, embellished chapter of the author's life. That "With Closed Eyes," a novel of provincial and peasant life in Tuscany, is wholly autobiographical, we have the testimony of a fellow Tuscan who says of Signor Tozzi that he first met him when he was a waiter in his father's tavern. Lazy, slothful, unkempt, and of coarse appearance, he had a passion for reading Angiolieri and Verlaine. He was radical, socially and politically. After a colorless, misspent youth beyond authority, parental or communal, he began newspaper work, the stepping-stones of so many Italian writers of to-day. The discipline of military life and the environment of Rome effected a change in his outward appearance, and the composition of his book, "Bestie" ("Beasts"), which the church put on the Index, helped him spiritually. "With Closed Eyes" is a narrative of his life, sordid, ugly, commonplace, revealing, however, a gradual spiritual uplift and refinement. It was not until the publication of "Tre Croci" that he was much discussed. Competent critics such as Signor Borghese think that Italy's most promising literary light was extinguished when Frederigo Tozzi died in Rome, in March, 1920. His literary output was not great for a man who had lived thirty-eight years, but it can truthfully be said that each succeeding volume from his pen showed that he was likely one day to be Verga's successor in the literary primacy of Italy. His last romance, "Il Podere," ("The Farm,") has not yet appeared in book form. One cannot always judge from first performances the potentialities of a writer. A few years ago Rosso di San Secondo, a young Sicilian, published "Io Commemoro Loletta" ("I Commemorate Loletta"), a series of short stories which in substance and in workmanship showed not only no talent but no promise of talent. In reality they seemed to show an absence of artistic capacity, architectural ability, and literary taste. A year later "La Bella Addormentata" ("The Sleeping Beauty"), a coloristic, mystic drama, a strange mixture of Plotinus and Dionysius, revealed real talent.