Elsa Morante; Novelist of Postwar Italy

Elsa Morante, one of Italy’s leading postwar novelists, is dead of a heart attack at age 67.

Her younger sister, Maria Morante, said that Elsa Morante died of a heart attack Monday at a Rome clinic where she had been undergoing treatment for hydrocephalus, an abnormal increase of fluid in the cranium.

The disease, discovered after she tried to commit suicide in 1983, left her paralyzed from the waist down. She touched on her malady in “Aracoeli,” her last novel, about a disillusioned homosexual and his family in which a woman character suffers with a brain disease.

Born in Rome on Aug. 18, 1918, Miss Morante shaped the lives of ordinary people into fantastic tales, often using symbols to avoid the Fascist censors of wartime Italy. Her heroes were farmers and children, who were often illiterate, living on the edge of or engulfed by poverty.

Her best-known works published in the United States include her first novel, “Menzogna e Sortilegio” (“Lies and Sorcery”), “L’Isola di Arturo” (“Arthur’s Island”) and “Storia,” translated into English as “History, A Novel.”

She was the estranged wife of Alberto Moravia, a playwright and novelist. They married in 1941, separated in 1963 and had no children.

Holder of the Viareggio and Strega Italian literary awards, Miss Morante never attended school and because of her illness led a solitary life in her final months.