Born in Sardinia and educated in Turin, Gramsci became one of the most celebrated 20th-century interpreters of Marx. A principal founder and the first general secretary of the Italian communist party, he was imprisoned from 1926 until his death. His major work is the posthumous Prison Notebooks, written between 1929 and 1935, which propounds a humanistic Marxism, stressing the need for a transformed self-consciousness or ‘battle of ideas’ in society before revolution would occur, and therefore dismissing the historical fatalism and materialism of orthodox Marxism. See also hegemony.