THE LEOPARD
(Published posthumous in 1958)
Tomasi di Lampedusa started writing his most famous novel towards the end of 1954. The initial idea was to tell about a day in his great grandfather's life at the time of Garibaldi's landing in Sicily, in an attempt to grasp his feelings in the revealing moment of the change of rule. But the Author immediately realised that he was not up to "writing another Ulysses" and he chose a different structure, expanding over fifty years: "1860, Garibaldi's landing - 1910, the end of everything".
While he was writing it, new material added to the original scheme, revealing a long and not easy literary gestation. It was only in 1956 that the novel took its final shape.
Once the work had been completed the main problem was its publication. There were numberless attempts to contact different publishers (Mondadori, Einaudi, Longanesi), but although they all seemed to appreciate his work, in the end they all refused it.
The Leopard was published, posthumously, on 11th November 1958 by Feltrinelli. Its success was extraordinary, sudden and unexpected even for the editor himself. On 7th July 1959 The Leopard was awarded the Strega prize.

"Nunc e in hora mortis nostrae. Amen."

I Racconti (Short Stories)
(Published posthumous in 1961)
Published with an introduction by Giorgio Bassani, the Short Stories are, in fact, four very heterogeneous texts. The longest, Memories of My Infancy, written in the summer of 1955, can be considered as a draft autobiography dedicated mostly to the dearest places in the author's life in an attempt, following in Stendhal's footsteps, to collect in memory "the feelings that have passed through our body".
In the preface to Feltrinelli's edition of the Short Stories Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi wrote: "Whoever considers himself a friend of Giuseppe Tomasi's, and many readers can regard themselves as such, will inevitably be moved by this document's evident, violent affectivity. The Memories of My Infancy reveal, more than his more exquisitely literary production, the writer's emotional personality, the man appearing behind the writer. They met two primary needs: a) recovering loved, and alas, lost objects; b) providing him with basic material for the central part of The Leopard. The magmatic quality of this material, piled up in different flows, had been reviewed by the author himself...The Memories of my Infancy, uncensored, reveal to the reader-friend the process of happiness in a fifty-eight -year old man....."

Places of my Infancy: a Memory

La gioia e la legge (Joy and Law)
Written in autumn 1956, it is a short story that is generally regarded as "not relevant to the author's private passions", as Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi wrote, also reminding us that, unlike Lampedusa's other short stories, this one was not translated into English. However, although relying a little on certain caricaturist stereotypes, this short story (that the author also called Il panettone) analyses, through the description of the feeling of uneasiness experienced by a modest office worker dealing with the debts and duties typical of the very low middle class, anguishes which are not so distant from the sensibility of a declining aristocrat.

When he boarded the bus he got in everyone's way...

The Siren
It is his most well-known and well-written short story. Known also as Lighea and written between 1956 and 1957, not without any afterthoughts, revealed by the discovery of a first version that was later abandoned, it tells of the fantastic and poetic romance between a young Greek scholar and the mythical sea creature, placing it within the realistic and almost humorous frame of the love affairs and work vicissitudes of a young Sicilian journalist who is significantly called Corbera.
Tomasi liked to read his works to his friends as if he were acting; to him this was also a way of confronting himself, after writing a new page, with a small audience. There is also a recording of The Siren, a work that he was very proud of. Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi tells us that: "Giuseppe used to read from a manuscript, with the strong Palermo accent of the past generation, an accent that has now almost disappeared, and he read in a meaningful way, revealing the hidden plots."

I had just awoken and got straight into the boat...."

The Blind Kittens
Finally, The Blind Kittens (or A Sharecropper's Morning, according to the frequent practice of the double title) is the first chapter of a novel that remained a draft, set in 1901 and probably centred on the theme of the ascent of the middle classes (embodied in the Ibba family). Written in March-April 1957, this fragment of an unfinished project, almost hinted at, is however of great interest because it links up to The Leopard, describing events that involve the Salina family, which here are portrayed in their unstoppable decline and in their cowardly inability to make a stand against the new rich rogues who, after taking possession of large landed estates, aim at conquering the capital and acquiring a higher social and cultural status.
The plan of the Ibba property, on a scale of I to 5,000...

THE ESSAYS
(Published posthumous in the period between 1971 and 1990)
A polyglot and a cosmopolite spirit, although deeply rooted in his being Sicilian, Tomasi di Lampedusa was also a self-taught keen scholar of English and French literatures, to which he devoted himself with the passion of an omnivorous and curious reader. This critical activity, carried out in an absolutely non professional and non professor-like way, resulted in such original and fertile essays as Lessons on Stendhal (1971), An Invitation to Sixteenth Century French Letters (1979) and above all in the two clear and concise but nonetheless laborious volumes of the course in English Literature (1990) held in 1953 for Francesco Orlando with the aim of initiating him to English language and culture through the privileged communication of his love for authors and books studied in a free and direct way.
In these very personal and at times even erratic notes, which range, with encyclopaedic competence, from Chaucer to Graham Greene we do not only recognise the stylistic approach of a writer confident in his skill, but also the diary and autobiography of man identified with and interpenetrated in his boundless and joyous reading.

ENGLISH LITERATURE
(Published posthumous in 1990)
The notes on the course that Tomasi held for the group of young intellectuals in 1954 were published in the period between 1990 and 1991.
English Literature, which was published posthumously, was left by the author in four folders, amounting to almost a thousand hand-written pages. The long work was composed in order to teach his small cenacle, and Francesco Orlando in particular, English literature and then French literature. It is a collection of lessons, reflections and notes in which the soul of the novelist is already strong.