Long Fiction:
Gli indifferenti, 1929 (The Indifferent Ones, 1932; also known as The Time of Indifference, 1953)
Le ambizioni sbagliate, 1935 (The Wheel of Fortune, 1937; also known as Mistaken Ambitions)
La mascherata, 1941 (The Fancy Dress Party, 1947)
Agostino, 1944 (English translation, 1947)
La romana, 1947 (The Woman of Rome, 1949)
La disubbidienza, 1948 (Disobedience, 1950)
L’amore coniugale, 1949 (Conjugal Love, 1951)
Il conformista, 1951 (The Conformist, 1952)
Il disprezzo, 1954 (A Ghost at Noon, 1955)
La ciociara, 1957 (Two Women, 1958)
La noia, 1960 (The Empty Canvas, 1961)
L’attenzione, 1965 (The Lie, 1966)
Io e lui, 1971 (Two: A Phallic Novel, 1972)
La vita interiore, 1978 (Time of Desecration, 1980)
1934, 1982 (English translation, 1983)
L’uomo che guarda, 1985 (The Voyeur, 1986)
Il viaggio a Roma, 1988 (Journey to Rome, 1990)
Short Fiction:
La bella vita, 1935
L’imbroglio, 1937
I sogni del pigro, 1940
L’amante infelice, 1943
L’epidemia: Racconti surrealistici e satirici, 1944
Due cortigiane, 1945
L’amore coniugale, e altri racconti, 1949
I racconti, 1927-1951, 1952
Bitter Honeymoon, and Other Stories, 1954 (selections from I racconti)
Racconti romani, 1954 (Roman Tales, 1956)
Nuovi racconti romani, 1959 (More Roman Tales, 1963)
The Way ward Wife, and Other Stories, 1960 (selections from I racconti)
L’automa, 1963 (The Fetish, 1964)
Una cosa è una cosa, 1967 (Command and I Will Obey You, 1969)
I racconti di Alberto Moravia, 1968
Il paradiso, 1970 (Paradise, and Other Stories, 1971; also known as Bought and Sold, 1973)
Un’altra vita, 1973 (Lady Godiva, and Other Stories, 1975; also known as Mother Love, 1976)
Boh, 1976 (The Voice of the Sea, and Other Stories, 1978)
La cosa, e altri racconti, 1983 (Erotic Tales, 1985)
Drama:
Gli indifferenti, pr., pb. 1948
La mascherata, pr. 1954
Beatrice Cenci, pr. 1955 (English translation, 1965)
Teatro, pb. 1958, 1976
Il mondo è quello che è, pr., pb. 1966 (The World’s the World, 1970)
L’intervista, pr., pb. 1966
Il dio Kurt, pr., pb. 1968
La vita è gioco, pb. 1969
L’angelo dell’informazione e altri testi teatrali, pb. 1986
Nonfiction:
Unmese in U.R.S.S., 1958 (travel sketch)
Saggi italiani del 1959, 1960
Un’idea dell’India, 1962 (travel sketch)
L’uomo come fine, e altri saggi, 1964 (Man as an End: A Defence of Humanism, Literary, Social, and Political Essays, 1965)
La rivoluzione cultural in Cina, 1967 (travel sketch; The Red Book and the Great Wall, 1968)
A quale tribù appartieni?, 1972 (travel sketch; Which Tribe Do You Belong To?, 1974)
Impegno controvoglia: Saggi, articoli, interviste, 1980
Lettere dal Sahara, 1981
L’inverno nucleare, 1986
Passeggiate africane, 1987
Vita de Moravia, 1990 (with Alain Elkann; Life of Moravia, 2000)
Children’s/Young Adult Literature:
Tre storie della preistoria, 1977
Quando Ba Lena era tanto piccola, 1978
Un miliardo di anni fa, 1979
Cosma e i briganti, 1980
Cama Leonte diventò verde lilla blu, 1981
Storie della preistoria, 1982
Alberto Pincherle Moravia (moh-RAH-vyah) was baptized in the Catholic religion of his mother, although his father was Jewish by origin. At a very early age, Alberto was stricken by tubercular osteomyelitis, and he remained bedridden for long periods during his childhood. Illness did not prevent him from exploring the world of fiction and creativity, however, and he began writing his first published work, The Time of Indifference, when he was only eighteen years old. With its success, he became one of Italy’s leading literary figures. By 1930, Moravia was sufficiently cured to begin to travel widely, first in Europe and eventually–as a foreign correspondent for at least two different Italian newspapers–in the United States and China. By 1935, the year in which his second novel, The Wheel of Fortune, appeared, his reputation as a writer was established enough for Columbia University to present him with an award and to host a series of his lectures on contemporary Italian authors. When he returned to Italy in 1936, however, he discovered that Benito Mussolini’s government had put his work on an official blacklist.
Alberto Moravia
It is not immediately clear why Moravia’s work was censored in this fashion. Part of the reason, no doubt, had to do with the fact that his themes, particularly in his early works, explore the moral dislocation of the Italian bourgeoisie, which seemed to be obsessed by the idea of serving its self-interest and searching for pleasure. The Wheel of Fortune was potentially even more scandalous than The Time of Indifference in its condemnation of the destructive nature of human egoism and false values. In this sense, both novels, but particularly the much more successful The Time of Indifference, represent existentialist perspectives several years before the formal birth of this literary movement in the postwar period. Over the next decade and beyond, Moravia dedicated himself to writing dozens of short stories and at least two short novels. The former, eventually collected and republished, represent a genre that earned for him an international literary reputation. Many of Moravia’s early short stories are masterly works of political satire which, in an indirect fashion, criticize the Mussolini regime. His short novels, on the other hand, especially Agostino and Disobedience, focus on the psychological stages of adolescence.
Moravia returned to the full-length novel and entered a new stage of his career as a writer in 1947, when he published The Woman of Rome. This book is notable for its exploration of Italian working-class and rural farm life–both social settings that are notably absent in the author’s earlier “high bourgeois” phase. It is also the first time that Moravia uses first-person narrative in his fiction, which becomes a characteristic of most of his post-World War II writings. Most of Moravia’s novels continue to focus on either the complicated psychology of conjugal love (as in Conjugal Love and A Ghost at Noon), or personal political repercussions of the Fascist regime during or after World War II (as in The Conformist and Two Women). With the translation of these works, his reputation spread to the English-speaking world.
Beyond his impressive output of book-length fictional works and explorations into the realm of theatrical drama, Moravia worked continuously on the series of short stories that first appeared in collected form as Roman Tales and More Roman Tales. These stories and others originally published in the Rome daily newspaper Corriere della sera are recognized as representing Moravia’s masterful stylistic skill at its best. Pithy and satirical, the racconti (tales) survey all facets of Italian life as seen from the first-person perspective of an anonymous member of the Roman working class.