The author of numerous novels, story and essay collections, and works of journalism and travel literature, Alberto
Moravia was Italy's preeminent man of letters throughout much of the twentieth-century. Steerforth Press is restoring
many of his best works to print, including the novels The Woman of Rome, The Time of Indifference, and Two Women.
In the winter of 2000, Steerforth will publish for the first time in English the biographical work, Life of Moravia.
Review
"Moravia brings to light the devil in the flesh and in the psyche."
- The Atlantic Monthly
World English Web Site, October, 2000
Summary
SECRECY AND SILENCE are second nature to Marcello Clerici, the hero of The Conformist, a book which made Alberto
Moravia one of the world's most read postwar writers. Clerici is a man with everything under control - a wife who
loves him, colleagues who respect him, the hidden power that comes with his secret work for the Italian political
police during the Mussolini years. But then he is assigned to kill his former professor, now in exile, to demonstrate
his loyalty to the Fascist state, and falls in love with a strange, compelling woman; his life is torn open - and
with it the corrupt heart of Fascism. Moravia equates the rise of Italian Fascism with the psychological needs
of his protagonist for whom conformity becomes an obsession in a life that has included parental neglect, an oddly
self-conscious desire to engage in cruel acts, and a type of male beauty which, to Clerici's great distress, other
men find attractive.
