Dino Buzzati was a painter, playwright, poet, novelist, short story writer, opera librettist, mountaineer, and science fiction writer, and-from the age of twenty-two until his death-worked as a journalist with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. In writing his books, he drew on folk tales, but he believed that fantasy should be written with all the detail of a newspaper account. Buzzati's most famous book for adults, The Tartar Steppe, shares with The Bears' Famous Invasion of Sicily a concern with the difficulty of keeping up one's courage in a confusing and often threatening world.