Alberto Moravia (1907-1990) was one of the most important, and certainly the most prolific, of modern Italian authors. His keen moralistic approach focuses mainly on the iniquities of bourgeois society.

Alberto Moravia was born Alberto Pincherle on November 28, 1907, in Rome, the son of a well-to-do architect. Stricken with osteomyelitis at the age of nine, he was in a hospital in Cortina d'Ampezzo until 1925. During these years he studied French, English, and German, became a voracious reader, and started writing fiction at the age of 11.

Moravia's first published novel, Gli indifferenti (1929; The Time of Indifference), was an immediate success. The following year he went abroad as a journalist for various newspapers, an activity which thereafter always accompanied his creative writing. He lived in Paris and London and visited the United States and Mexico (1935), China (1937), and Greece (1938). In the early 1940s he lived on Capri with his wife, the novelist...