Italian · 1907–1990
Italian novelist who chronicled bourgeois malaise across six decades. Born Alberto Pincherle in Rome, he published his first novel, The Time of Indifference, at twenty-two, scandalizing Fascist Italy with its portrait of moral emptiness. Tuberculosis kept him from war; writing kept him prolific. Contempt, Boredom, The Conformist—the titles announce his themes. Characters drift through sex and alienation while Moravia's prose stays clinical, precise. Twice president of PEN International, he wrote until the end. The cold eye never warmed.