Gramsci wrote the Prison Notebooks during an eleven-year physical death-agony

Evidence

It is therefore not surprising that Gramsci’s letters from prison reveal a sense of isolation that was more than simply a physical one—but compounded terribly both by political preoccupations and by anxiety about Julia. Increasingly, Gramsci was forced back into himself. Much of the time, particularly towards the end of his stay in Turi, he was too ill even to read or write. Hunchbacked, sickly, having suffered at least three major breakdowns of his health even when he was free and able to enjoy medical attention and maintain a special diet, his years in prison were literally an eleven-year death-agony. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 236

Related

• Gramsci’s chronic illness shaped his life and the conditions under which he wrote. (similarity 0.86)
• Gramsci conceived the Prison Notebooks as a project for the ages. (similarity 0.85)
• Gramsci’s major theoretical work was written in prison without library access (similarity 0.84)
• Gramsci was held in near-total isolation and surveillance in Milan for over a year (similarity 0.83)
• Gramsci’s prison letters persist through deprivation without self-pity (similarity 0.83)
• The prison notebooks were a deliberate strategy against political self-abandonment (similarity 0.81)
• Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks were written under fascist imprisonment and smuggled out. (similarity 0.81)
• Gramsci died in 1937 in a Rome clinic, days after his sentence expired (similarity 0.80)
• Fascist prison conditions nearly killed Gramsci before transfer to Formia (similarity 0.80)
• The Prison Notebooks comprise thirty-three fragmented, partially revised notebooks. (similarity 0.80)
• The prison Notebooks’ fragmentary form shapes how his concepts must be read (similarity 0.80)
• Fascist imprisonment ended Gramsci’s active intellectual life at forty-six (similarity 0.80)
• Political commitment, not ill health, drove Gramsci from university. (similarity 0.79)
• Censorship forced Gramsci’s political commentary into opaque, allusive form in prison (similarity 0.79)
• Gramsci’s notebooks are too fragmentary for definitive claims about his project. (similarity 0.79)