Alberto Moravia

Italian writer and journalist (1907-1990)

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Lived 1907–1990, aged 83Italy

Italy WritersWriter / Author

Wikipedia
66 languages
Cross-language footprint
Era
1907–1990
Aged 83
Known for
The Voyeur
1994

Summary

Updated 2026-06-21

Alberto Moravia wrote novels about boredom, conformity, and sexual disconnect among the Italian middle class with a clinical eye that made readers squirm. His cold, precise prose and anti-fascist stance turned him into one of postwar Europe's most adapted authors — Godard, Bertolucci, and De Sica all came to him for stories.

Biography

About

Born Alberto Pincherle in 1907, he spent five years bedridden with tubercular bone disease as a child — an experience he later credited, along with Fascism, for shaping everything he wrote. He published his debut Gli indifferenti at twenty-one in 1929, then cemented his reputation with the anti-fascist novel Il conformista in 1947. Through the 1950s and '60s he became a fixture of European cinema: Godard adapted Il disprezzo as Contempt, Bertolucci turned Il conformista into The Conformist, De Sica made La ciociara into Two Women. Between 1959 and 1962 he led PEN International. He remained an…

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