SOURCE: "Moravia and the Middle Class: the Case of 'Seduta spiritica,'" in Homage to Moravia, edited by Rocco Capozzi and Mario B. Mignone, Forum Italicum, 1993, pp. 141-50.

SOURCE: "Tales of Adolescence," in Alberto Moravia, Twayne Publishers, 1996, pp. 35-54.

Discussing the large number of youthful protagonists in great literature, Moravia [in Vita] states, "The reason is simple and clear: the young person marries the maximum of passionate vitality with the maximum of ideals. Then there was a kind of revolution beginning with the 19th century, for which the narrator attributed a particular importance to what I would call the initiation of adolescence, and the age of the protagonists was lowered. In this sense my four novels of adolescence are four novels of initiation." With the exception of Indifference, these novels of initiation were written in the early 1940s: Agostino, La romana (The Woman of Rome), and La disubbidienza...