Alberto Moravia

Born Alberto Pincherle to a partly Jewish family, Moravia spent much of his childhood bedridden with tubercular bone disease, teaching himself literature in place of school; he took his grandmother's surname as a pen name and self-financed his first novel, The Time of Indifference (1929), a scathing portrait of bourgeois moral vacancy that made him famous at twenty-one and drew the Fascist censors' attention for the rest of the regime's life.

He married Elsa Morante in 1941, and the two fled occupied Rome together in 1943, hiding for months in the mountains to the south. The Woman of Rome (1947) and The Conformist, his cold anatomy of a man who becomes a Fascist assassin out of sheer craving to belong, established the clinical, undramatic style he kept for six decades of near-constant productivity. He served in the European Parliament in his final years and died in Rome in 1990.