Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), Italian Marxist thinker and activist, one of the founders of the Italian Communist party.

Gramsci was born in poverty in Sardinia. He entered the University of Turin in 1911, but left in 1914 because of chronic ill-health. In 1916 he became a journalist on Avanti!, the newspaper of the Socialist party, but then, with Palmiro Togliatti and others, founded the journal L'Ordine Nuovo (New Order) in 1919 and took part in the Factory Councils movement which unsuccessfully challenged Fiat and other companies in and around Turin during 1920. Having been one of the founders of the Italian Communist party (the PCI) in January 1921, he worked for the Comintern, the international federation of Communist parties, in Moscow and Vienna but returned to Italy in 1924 to join the parliamentary opposition to the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini. He was arrested in 1926 and imprisoned in 1928. He died in a prison hospital in Rome on April 27, 1937.

Gramsci's influence has continued through his Quaderni del carcere (Prison Notebooks), first published between 1948 and 1951. His analysis of the difficulties of changing advanced societies, in which ruling classes exercise not only military and political domination but also intellectual and cultural hegemony, attracted the attention of Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, and other Marxists, as well as of thinkers who reject his revolutionary outlook.