“Gramsci’s martyrdom is relevant to his subsequent fame, for it was the Letters from Prison, first published in an incomplete edition in 1947 and now finally selected and translated into English by Lynne Lawner with a lucid and useful introduction of fifty-seven pages, that captured the reading public. What gripped readers was not only, as Lawner says, “one of the significant works of twentieth-century Italian literature,” but also the exemplary story of suffering and resistance by the small, crippled, sick revolutionary from a poverty-stricken Sardinian background, whose brain, as Mussolini said, had to be stopped from functioning. Before death stopped it, Gramsci had filled the equivalent of 4,000 typescript pages in the notebooks (published in six volumes, 1948-1951).”
Eric Hobsbawm, New York Review of Books, April 4, 1974