Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Italian: Lezioni americane. Sei proposte per il prossimo millennio) is a book based on a series of lectures written by Italo Calvino for the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, but never delivered as Calvino died before leaving Italy. The lectures were originally written in Italian and translated by Patrick Creagh. The lectures were to be given in the fall of 1985, and Memos was published in 1988. The memos are lectures on the values of literature that Calvino felt were important for the coming millennium. At the time of his death Calvino had finished all but the last lecture.

Six Memos for the Millennium is a collection of five lectures Italo Calvino was about to deliver at the time of his death. The universal values he pinpoints become the watchwords for the appreciation of Calvino himself. What should be cherished in literature? Calvino devotes one lecture, or memo to the reader, to each of five indispensable qualities: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. A sixth lecture, on consistency, was never committed to paper.[1]