Primo Michele Levi (Italian: [ˈpriːmo ˈlɛːvi]; 31 July 1919 – 11 April 1987) was a Jewish-Italian chemist, partisan, Holocaust survivor and writer. He was the author of several books, collections of short stories, essays, poems and one novel. His best-known works include: If This Is a Man (Se questo è un uomo, 1947, published as Survival in Auschwitz in the United States), his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and The Periodic Table (1975), a collection of mostly autobiographical short stories, each named after a chemical element which plays a role in each story, which the Royal Institution named the best science book ever written.
Levi died in 1987 from injuries sustained in a fall from a third-storey apartment landing. His death was officially ruled a suicide, although that has been disputed by some of his friends and associates and attributed to an accident.
