Elsa Morante

Morante was born in Rome to a mother who kept secret the identity of her biological father, and grew up believing a minor civil servant, Augusto Morante, was her own. She married the novelist Alberto Moravia in 1941; as a Jewish antifascist couple during the German occupation, they fled Rome in 1943 and hid for months in a mountain village south of the city, an experience she later folded into History: A Novel.

Arturo's Island (1957), her lyrical account of a motherless boy's Sicilian childhood, won the Strega Prize. She and Moravia separated in the early 1960s, and the suicide of a young American painter she loved, Bill Morrow, left her shattered. History: A Novel (1974), her furious account of occupied Rome seen through a schoolteacher and her child, became a controversial bestseller for its deliberately plain, mass-market style. She attempted suicide in 1983 and died two years later after a long illness.