Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco was a literary critic and professor of semiotics at several universities in Italy and the United States, including Columbia University, Harvard University, and the University of Bologna. He pioneered the field of interpretative semiotics—the study of how meaning is conveyed through language—and has also written on anthropology, political theory, and aesthetics. But Eco is perhaps best known as a novelist; his first novel, The Name of the Rose (1980), was an international bestseller, and he later wrote other critically and popularly acclaimed books including Foucault’s Pendulum (1988). He died of pancreatic cancer in 2016.