Mussolini dictated parts of the text to his brother Arnaldo Mussolini who handed the manuscripts, together with other material supplied by Mussolini's lover Margherita Sarfatti, to Richard Washburn Child (the former American ambassador to Italy). Child served together with Luigi Barzini, Jr. as a ghostwriter for the autobiography, which was mainly aimed at readers in the U.S. It was a paid work of propaganda and remained unpublished in Italy until 1971. It was first serialized in The Saturday Evening Post (May to Oct. 1928) and then published as a book, with a foreword, by Child. In this preface, he wrote:
In our time it may be shrewdly forecast that no man will exhibit dimensions of permanent greatness equal to those of Mussolini.
The autobiography was first published as a book in gilt-lettered green cloth by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1928. The text's typescript is held in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Hurst & Blackett reprinted a Paternoster Library cheap edition in 1936 (the title page says 11th thousand). A Japanese translation was published in 1937. In 1939, Hutchinson & Co. published an edition with "specially authorized additions by arrangement and approval of Il Duce, bringing it up to the year 1939".
^Mussolini, Benito (1928). My Autobiography. Charles Scribner's Sons. p. xi.
D'Agostino, Peter R. Rome in America. Transnational Catholic Ideology from the Risoregimento to Fascism. U of North Carolina P, 2004.
Diggins, John P. Mussolini and Fascism: the View from America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1972.
Fermi, Laura. Mussolini. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1961.
Lindberg, Kathryn V. "Mass Circulation versus The Masses. Covering the Modern Magazine Scene." In: National Identities - Postamerican Narratives. Ed. Donald E. Pease. Duke UP, 1994, 279-310.
