Boys Alive, published in 1955, was Pier Paolo Pasolini's first novel and remains his best-known work of fiction. He'd moved to Rome a few years before, after finding himself embroiled in a provincial sex scandal, and the impact of the city on Pasolini—its lively, aggressive dialect, its postwar squalor and violence—was accompanied by a new awareness that for him respectability was no longer an option: “Like it or not, I was tarred with the brush of Rimbaud . . . or even Oscar Wilde.” Urgently looking for teaching work, walk-on parts in films, literary journalism, anything to achieve independence and security, he was drawn to other outcasts who cared nothing for bourgeois values, who lived intensely, carelessly, refusing to be hampered by scruple and convention.
