Elsa Morante

Elsa Morante (1912-1985) was born in Rome to a Jewish mother and was raised in modest circumstances that would deeply inform her literary vision. She began writing stories as a teenager and married the novelist Alberto Moravia in 1941, though the two separated in 1962. During the German occupation of Rome, Morante and Moravia hid in the mountains south of the city, an experience of displacement and fear that would profoundly shape her fiction. Her first novel, House of Liars, won the Viareggio Prize in 1948. This author hub collects 1 work in the Canon Compass ranking, led by History.