Umberto Eco was a medieval scholar who decided to write a murder mystery set in a fourteenth-century Benedictine monastery, and it became one of the best-selling novels of the twentieth century. The Name of the Rose, published in 1980, sold over 50 million copies in more than 30 languages. It was a detective story wrapped in theology, semiotics, and the politics of monastic life. The detective is an English Franciscan named William of Baskerville who uses Aristotelian logic to solve murders. It shouldn't have worked at all. Born in Alessandria, Piedmont on January 5, 1932, Eco grew up during World War II and earned his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Turin with a thesis on the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas. He became one of Europe's leading semioticians, building a career studying how signs, symbols, and cultural codes create meaning. His academic works, particularly A Theory of Semiotics and The Role of the Reader, were dense and influential. He didn't turn to fiction until he was 48. His second novel, Foucault's Pendulum, published in 1988, parodied conspiracy theories with such elaborate, encyclopedic detail that actual conspiracy theorists adopted it as a reference text, missing the satire entirely. The novel follows three editors who fabricate a grand conspiracy theory as a joke and then discover that people start dying because of it. His later novels, including The Island of the Day Before and Baudolino, continued mixing historical fiction with philosophical puzzles. Eco owned a personal library of approximately 30,000 books and collected rare manuscripts and incunabula. He wrote a weekly newspaper column for L'Espresso for over three decades, covering everything from soccer to fascism to the semiotics of Superman. He held chairs at the University of Bologna, where he founded one of the first graduate programs in semiotics. He died on February 19, 2016, at 84, leaving behind a body of work that treated popular culture and medieval philosophy with equal intellectual seriousness, refusing to acknowledge any hierarchy between them.