Nine days after completing his diary, "The Profession of Living," Cesare Pavese took his own life. He had taken an overdose of sleeping pills in a Turin hotel room shortly before. He had published his novel "The Moon and the Fires" in 1950, which won one of Italy's most prestigious literary prizes, the Strega Prize for Fiction. But he had also faced the end of his relationship with American actress Constance Dowling. With the frankness characteristic of Cesare Pavese's diary, "The Profession of Living," Pavese hints at the troubled relationship between life and writing through the subtitle "Professional Secret," which covers a four-month period during the first two years (1935-1936) in which he recorded it, vividly depicted also in stories such as "The Country of Exile" and "The Jailbirds."