Men and not written by Vittorini between spring and summer of 1944 and published the following year, is the novel of the gloomiest and hot Resistance in Milan period, the post-September 1943. The city breathes and months ferments in a single passion: bloody, fatal fight as a biological necessity, to which workers and intellectuals have been delivered with desperate will. Both men and not men, men or maybe not men: peaceful and simple men, who fight and kill, and that is terrible without being; men who carried the action, check that the struggle continues only if you put in it the terrible inhumanity in man, which, despite everything, is still the man.

This fight is not presented by a given costumbrismo anecdote and chronicler, but is recreated in the fiery heart of the action, by a poet who scrutinizes the soul of his characters with a warm and almost hallucinatory look. Feelings appear filtered and purified in a superhuman tension, necessarily withdrawn from the schemes of a normal existence: one love, one of those loves that usually are defined as impossible, retrieves, in the exceptional historical moment, its natural justification.