He was born in Guardialfiera, in 1902, from poor family, and he completed the magistral and then the university studies with many sacrifices. He was the assistant of Giuseppe Lombardo-Radice and then a headmaster. He participated to the cultural debate of the Thirties but, being unpopular in the official culture, first he went in Tunisia and then in Egypt. His first novel, Un uomo provvisorio (1934) was attached from the fascist critique, because not in line with the regime and its second edition was forbidden.
The second book, Ladro di galline (1940), is a collection of short stories written in the period of the exile in Tunisia and in Egypt. The style preludes to Realism, but it has not abandoned some decadent ways yet.
Signora Ava (1943) fully feels Verga’s lesson: the story is developed in Guardialfiera in the last years of the Bourbon regime; the Signora Ava is not a character but a myth and a proverbial symbol, a kind of "anonymous muse of the novel", that would like to be a historical novel of realistic type. However a historical-realistic novel came out fifty years late, because told by a descendant, not from a contemporary. The work has appeared fragmentary; but in the succeeded episodes it reveals an art not only inspired to the irony but also to the pity that the author has toward some typical creatures of his lands.
Il pastore sepolto (1945) is his second collection of short stories, that still recalles to the themes of Molise.
In the postwar period, when the new poetic preached the struggle against the lyricism, the tendency to autobiography and the prose of art, for a realistic and more busy literature, for Jovine it was enough to deepen the themes already treated and the already initiated realistic technique. In fact L’impero in provincia (1945), a collection of stories, that is among the busiest books of the postwar period and that underlines in the irony and in the satire to the fascist rhetoric the enormous contrast between the imperialistic dreams of the regime and the poverty and the abandonment of our southern farmers, is well inserted for the civil and social problems and for the engagement of burning actuality in the literary debate of the postwar period.
Tutti i miei peccati (1948) is another series of stories in a social psychological background. Meanwhile Jovine joined to Marxism as to the more congenial political ideology to his antifascist attitude of the youth. The knowledge of the thought and the books of Gramsci, moreover, clarified in him the explorations and the personal investigations that he had done on the backward conditions of the South.
Le terre del Sacramento (1950), will be inspired to the social struggle of the desperate southern farmers for the hunger of the lands and for the secular poverty. Jovine, choosing as matter the situation of the laborers of Molise the day after the first world war, the injustices of which he had been spectator, and limiting his narration to historically near facts, could tie very well those tragedy to the situation of the farmers in the second postwar period. This kind of denunciation was a very close element to the Neoralism’s poetic.
" The true new fact in the fiction of Jovine comes out with Le terre del Sacramento [… ] published after his death, that all unanimously recognizes as the best fruit of his art. Also this novel is set in Molise, also in this novel they are found again the idle "gentlemen", the miserable and exploited farmers, the poor intellectual that pants to a richest life. But any fabulist intonation has disappeared, the times are those, lived by the author, of the first postwar period and above all his ability of ideological interpretation is more modern. To the little bit upper-class skepticism, that accompanied Verga and the verists in the objective and comprehensive examination of the southern reality, to the separation, even if full of liking, with which they looked at their characters, to the deep pessimism that originates from the considering unchangeable that society with all its contradictions, injustices and poverties, Jovine, replaces the vision of a reality in movement, a less painful and pessimistic consideration of the South.
It is true that this book finishes with the defeat of the farmers and with the death of Luca through the fascist; but the defeat happens during a struggle and is the premise of tomorrow's victory. The novel is hinged around a fundamental character: Luca. He is not a hero: Luca is a farmers’ child that lets him study to become priest. When he decides to don’t go ahead for that road, he tries to earn something doing the copyist and somehow to continue his studies. He becomes then the workers' councilor, but after all it is only to gratify Ms. Laura Cannavale, the mistress, that he persuades the farmers to till Le Terre del Sacramento with the promise that they will be subsequently granted them in emphyteusis. Laura doesn't keep her word and, when the lands have been worked, she sends the evict to the farmers. Luca, who has the great responsibilities, becomes naturally their leader: he drives them to the occupation of the lands and he dies under the lead of the policemen and the black shirts. As it is seen, the development of the personality of Luca is wisely dosed during the novel and it happens under the push of the events, in a way to never detach the character from the reality reducing him to the manikin of a perfect hero" (C. Salinari)
Jovine has died in 1950, prematurely.