Moravia once remarked that the most important facts of his life had been his illness, a tubercular infection of the bones that confined him to a bed for five years and Fascism because they both caused him to suffer and do things he otherwise would not have done.

The brothers Carlo and Nello Rosselli, founders of the anti-fascist resistance movement Giustizia e Libertà, murdered in France by Benito Mussolini's order in 1937, were paternal cousins and his maternal uncle, Augusto De Marsanich, was an undersecretary in the National Fascist Party cabinet.

Moravia was an intelligent boy, and devoted himself to reading books and some of his favourite authors were Giosuè Carducci, Giovanni Boccaccio, Fyodor Dostoevsky, James Joyce, Ludovico Ariosto, Carlo Goldoni, William Shakespeare, Molière, Nikolai Gogol and Stéphane Mallarmé.

In 1933, together with Mario Pannunzio, he founded the literary review magazines Caratteri (Characters) and Oggi (Today) and started writing for the newspaper Gazzetta del Popolo.

The years leading to World War II were difficult for Moravia as an author; the Fascist regime prohibited reviews of Le ambizioni sbagliate (1935), seized his novel La mascherata (Masquerade, 1941) and banned Agostino (Two Adolescents, 1941).

To avoid Fascist censorship, Moravia wrote mainly in the surrealist and allegoric styles; among the works is Il sogno del pigro (The Dream of the Lazy).

In 1952 he won the Premio Strega for I Racconti and his novels began to be translated abroad and La Provinciale was adapted to film by Mario Soldati; in 1954 Luigi Zampa directed La Romana and in 1955 Gianni Franciolini directed I Racconti Romani (The Roman Stories, 1954) a short collection that won the Marzotto Award.

In 1953, Moravia founded the literary magazine Nuovi Argomenti (New Arguments), which featured Pier Paolo Pasolini among its editors.

In 1960, Moravia published La noia (Boredom or The Empty Canvas), the story of the troubled sexual relationship between a young, rich painter striving to find sense in his life and an easygoing girl in Rome.

His 1982 trip to Japan, including a visit to Hiroshima, inspired a series of articles for L'Espresso magazine about the atomic bomb.

Moral aridity, the hypocrisy of contemporary life and the inability of people to find happiness in traditional ways such as love and marriage are the regnant themes in the works of Alberto Moravia.

Usually, these conditions are pathologically typical of middle-class life; marriage is the target of works such as Disobedience and L'amore coniugale (Conjugal Love, 1947).

Alienation is the theme in works such as Il disprezzo (Contempt or A Ghost at Noon, 1954) and La noia (The Empty Canvas) from the 1950s, despite observation from a rational-realistic perspective.

Political themes are often present; an example is La Romana (The Woman of Rome, 1947), the story of a prostitute entangled with the Fascist regime and with a network of conspirators.

Moravia's writing style was highly regarded for being extremely stark and unadorned, characterised by elementary, common words in an elaborate syntax.