Umberto Eco is probably Italy's most famous living intellectual figure. A significant portion of his critical works has been translated into English, not to mention countless other languages, even though that portion is but a small fraction of the mass of work he has produced in a wide variety of fields. While it is his literary and cultural theory, particularly associated with semiotics (a field to which he has made major contributions since the mid-1960s) which has established Eco's reputation as a major European intellectual, capable of comparison to such thinkers as Foucault, Lacan, Althusser, Derrida, or Barthes, Eco has a second and even broader international audience created by the extraordinary success of three widely read novels: The Name of the Rose (made into a major motion picture starring Sean Connery); Foucault's Pendulum; and The Island of the Day Before.

Given Eco's fame, it is surprising that numerous English-language books on him and his works are not already available. Dozens of books each year appear in English focusing upon other major European literary or cultural theorists, but readers searching for reliable information about Eco's intellectual development must be satisfied to peruse specialized scholarly journals or to glance through the all-too-brief critical introductions or translators' comments included in several English translations of his major works. The fact that French is the foreign language and culture most familiar to English or American academics (especially those interested in literary theory or cultural studies) undoubtedly helps in part to explain this strange oversight.