“I am the bitter point of oscillations

between the moons and tides”. 1
(Il Mondo salvato dai ragazzini, The World Saved by Kids)

“[...] you who bind yourself in life and death with the things you do, almost identifying with them. But you see, this is in fact your gift: to join into one the most disparate elements [...]. You feel that the world is broken into pieces, that the things to consider are countless and impossible to compare, but, with your lucid and affectionate stubbornness, you always manage to balance the books”.
(Italo Calvino, letter to Elsa Morante, March 2, 1950)

If Elsa Morante had to be defined, the labels she might have accepted would likely be “poet” and “storyteller.” Her literary journey began during World War II and extended into the early 1980s, capturing in both novels and poems her vision of twentieth-century reality. Morante built her poetics and style like a chrysalis around a vocation for writing that had been evident since her early childhood. Drawing inspiration from the nineteenth-century novel for themes, topoi, and narrative structures, she remained markedly independent from the literary circles and trends of her time. Her vast and eclectic background as a reader, combined with her talent for reworking archetypes and structures to create her distinctive voice and unforgettable characters, allowed her to shape both her meta-literary awareness and her personal sensibility throughout the events of her life.

Morante was born in Rome on August 18, 1912. Her mother, Irma Poggibonsi, a Jewish woman originally from Modena, was an elementary school teacher, while her legal father, Augusto Morante, worked as an instructor in a reformatory. However, the biological father of Elsa and her three siblings—Aldo, Marcello, and Maria—was Francesco Lo Monaco, a close family friend whose ambiguous position within the household was seemingly accepted by Augusto. Her mother’s Jewish religion and the elusiveness of her father figure would both later emerge as central motifs in Morante’s writing. She began writing stories and poems from an early age.


After graduating from high school, Morante decided to live on her own. She enrolled in the Faculty of Literature but soon left her studies to support herself through a variety of jobs: she wrote for magazines such as Il Corriere dei piccoli (Little Courier ) and I diritti della scuola (School Rights Magazine), worked as a translator, and gave private lessons. She also wrote under pseudonyms for the magazine Oggi (Today), signing her contributions as Antonio Carrera, Renzo Diodati, or simply Diodati. In 1941, she translated Scrapbook by Katherine Mansfield for publisher Longanesi. That same year, she married novelist Alberto Moravia, whom she had met in 1936. Accused of antifascism, Moravia was forced into hiding in the rural region of Ciociaria, in Lazio, where they both lived until the end of World War II. During this period, Garzanti published Morante’s short story collection Il gioco segreto (The Secret Game). Alongside her earlier writings, this collection laid the literary groundwork for her first novel, introducing themes that would become central to her work: theatricality, dreamlike atmospheres, and a deep empathy for lost or disoriented characters searching for fulfillment.

In 1942, Le bellissime avventure di Caterì dalla trecciolina (The Beautiful Adventures of Caterì with the Little Braid 3), a fairy tale written during Morante’s school years, was published by Einaudi. Around the same time, she began working on her first novel, Menzogna e sortilegio (House of Liars or Lies and Sorcery4), which—thanks to the support of Natalia Ginzburg—was published by Einaudi in 1948 and went on to win the Viareggio Prize. Narrated by Elisa, the story unfolds as a family saga and a journey among the dead: a chronicle of generations swept away by overwhelming passions and inescapable instincts, set in a Southern Italy marked by social stagnation and a quiet, resigned fatalism. In 1957, Morante published L’isola di Arturo (Arturo’s Island), another first-person narrative, this time recounting the adolescence of Arturo on the island of Procida. The novel takes place in a luminous, cyclical world shaped by the rhythms of nature and the seasons. Arturo ultimately leaves this world after an impossible love for his young stepmother, Nunziata, and after confronting the all-too-human flaws of a father he had once worshipped as a distant, godlike figure. Under Morante’s vivid pen, the Bildungsroman becomes a mythic and existential initiation into life, with history lurking on the margins, hinted at only by allusions to fascism and Arturo’s departure for war as a "revolutionary." Arturo’s complex emotional life blends with the protective yet shadowy atmosphere of the island, dominated by its looming penitentiary. The darker facets of the unconscious resonate with the rugged, irregular contours of the Mediterranean landscape. Above all the
characters stands the figure of the Neapolitan stepmother, Nunziata, whose naïve yet vital force—according to Morante herself—embodies her ideal of womanhood, a figure of authentic emotional truth.

The 1960s marked a turning point in Morante’s literary journey. While the publication of the short story collection Lo scialle andaluso (The Andalusian Shawl, 1963) still belongs to her early phase, her love and subsequent loss of the young American painter Bill Morrow—who fell to his death from a skyscraper in New York—, the essay Pro o contro la bomba atomica (For or Against the Atomic Bomb, 1965), and the hybrid work Il mondo salvato dai ragazzini (The World Saved by Kids, 1968) reflect an unambiguous decision to clash with the outside world. In her own words: "Art is the opposite of disintegration. […] Its function is precisely this: to prevent the disintegration of human conscience in its daily, exhausting, alienating interaction with the world; to constantly give back to it, amid the unreal, fragmented, worn-out chaos of external relations, the integrity of the real—or in one word, reality." (Elsa Morante, Opere, vol. II, p. 1542) As early as 1959, in an interview with the Italian literary magazine Nuovi Argomenti, Morante had likened the role of the novelist-poet “to that of the solar hero of myth, who faces the night dragon to free the terrified city” (p. 1546). She had come to the painful realization that the "bureaucratic petty-bourgeois culture”of her day was already infected by a suicidal rage for atomic destruction (p. 1540).

“Useppe…” she called softly.
Useppe turned at her call, but his gaze remained fixed, and even when it met hers, it did not question her. In the boundless horror of his eyes there was also fear, or rather, a stunned astonishment; but it was an astonishment that asked for no explanation.
(History: A Novel)

Against the scandal of the History of the powers that be, Morante gives her own interpretation of historical flow in novel form. In her 1974 novel La Storia (History: A Novel), which earned scathing reviews from militant critics for its alleged populism, she juxtaposes the official chronology of World War II (presented as lists of factual events) with the woeful story of an inseparable and unlikely pair: a humble schoolteacher, Ida, and her little son Useppe, living in Nazi-occupied Rome. This weighty novel depicts, as if in a movie, a succession of scenes from the everyday life of a host of characters, all somehow victims to History—Jews, conscripted youth on the front or fleeing, refugees—,whose sparse yet moving dialogue expresses their search for meaning amidst their shared trauma. The language, aimed at who Morante in her essay on Fra Angelico called the “idiots”—those whose intellect is confined to their position in time and space—is a compelling mix of everyday speech and a literary style aiming to capture the subtlest nuances of reality. Similes, in particular, are a favored stylistic tool.

The plot is shaped by the voice of an omniscient narrator, and, as often happens in Morante's work, includes the comforting presence of animals. The influence of Simone Weil’s thought is clearly discernible throughout the novel. Writer Anna Maria Ortese later wrote to Morante expressing her admiration for La Storia and for Aracoeli (1983), Morante’s final novel. Aracoeli tells the Dantean journey of Manuele, a solitary man in search of a lost paradise—his Andalusian mother, Aracoeli. By alternating past and present, the novel gradually reveals the history between mother and son, their love, the tragedy of Aracoeli’s decline, and the son’s obsessive longing for the only woman who ever truly loved him. Both the bourgeoisie’s false values and the revolutionary illusions of 1968 are dismantled. Whether describing the fascist-era society of Manuele’s childhood or the morally exhausted landscape of the 1970s, Morante paints a disturbing tableau—one that evokes either a futurist painting or a grotesque circus act.

In the final chapter of her life and work, Morante faced anguish: the loss of her friend Pier Paolo Pasolini, a broken leg, a suicide attempt, and the diagnosis of hydrocephalus. Morante, by now impoverished, faced significant medical expenses. After Moravia publicly petitioned the state to financially support her, the controversial Bacchelli law was passed. Elsa Morante, a sharp and uncompromising witness of the short twentieth century and its countless contradictions, died on November 25, 1985.

Translated by Rebecca Cigognini.
1 Translation by Rebecca Cigognini
2 In English Il Corriere dei piccoli can be translated into Courier of the Little Ones, but for English speakers it’s more known as Little Courier
3 Translation by Rebecca Cigognini
4 Both English titles are available