Morante

Manu Fernandez/Associated Press Spanish matador Morante de la Puebla made a pass during a bullfight at the Monumental bullring in Barcelona, Spain, Saturday.

Sports Snapshots 2010

When the Morante family moved to Monte Verde Nuovo in 1922, Elsa joined them, attending the Virgilio gymnasium.

Elsa Morante. 2009

In any case, Morante, who was herself hostile to the idea of raking through the personal lives of writers, didn't leave behind the sort of private writings that biographers covet.

A Fresh Focus on Novelist Morante Michael McDonald 2008

She doesn't just report what the actress Adriana Asti says about her encounters with Morante in the late 1950s; Ms. Tuck instead takes a Vanity Fair profile approach: "Adriana and I were having lunch at the Hotel Excelsior in Naples, the sort of quietly elegant hotel I am sure Elsa Morante would have loved."

A Fresh Focus on Novelist Morante Michael McDonald 2008

Morante waited nearly 30 years to pen her most important work about the war.

A Fresh Focus on Novelist Morante Michael McDonald 2008

Undaunted, Ms. Tuck plunged ahead with her life of Morante.

A Fresh Focus on Novelist Morante Michael McDonald 2008

As for factual material, Ms. Tuck's volume is heavily indebted to three sources: the densely annotated 90-page cronologia that appears in the first volume of the deluxe Italian edition of Morante's works; a 1990 biography of Moravia published in Italy; and a book on Morante by the Italian critic Cesare Garboli.

A Fresh Focus on Novelist Morante Michael McDonald 2008

Morante left home at 18 and struggled for years to make ends meet by writing for newspapers and popular magazines.

A Fresh Focus on Novelist Morante Michael McDonald 2008

Something of a dreamy bohemian, left-leaning and libertarian, Morante had her own views on the public issues that roiled Italian society.

A Fresh Focus on Novelist Morante Michael McDonald 2008

Morante is apt to disappear as the biographer herself takes center stage to prattle on -- about life in Rome when Ms. Tuck was a child, about her meetings with people who knew Morante, about her father (who made movies in Italy in the 1950s), and even about her father's Jamaican girlfriend.

A Fresh Focus on Novelist Morante Michael McDonald 2008