Italian poet, novelist, essayist, and filmmaker — an unusual case of a major 20th-century author who worked at the first rank in several forms simultaneously and who held together, with programmatic seriousness, an unorthodox Marxism and an unorthodox Catholicism that most of his contemporaries considered incompatible. His work is permanently marked by the poverty of the Friulian countryside where his mother was from and the borgate, the working-class outskirts of Rome, where he lived from the late 1940s.
The literary work preceded the films. The Friulian-language poems of Poesie a Casarsa (1942); the Italian poetry of Le ceneri di Gramsci (The Ashes of Gramsci, 1957), which gave the long Italian ode a new and deliberately compromised voice; and the novels Ragazzi di vita (The Ragazzi, 1955) and Una vita violenta (1959), which brought the Roman street-Latin of the borgate into Italian fiction and attracted prosecution for obscenity. The film career began in 1961 with Accattone, adapted from the novels' material, and continued through Mamma Roma (1962), The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) — a materialist gospel filmed with non-actors in southern Italy, dedicated to John XXIII and often named the best film ever made about Jesus by believers and non-believers alike — The Hawks and the Sparrows (1966), Oedipus Rex (1967), Teorema (1968), Medea (1969), and the "Trilogy of Life" drawn from The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and The Arabian Nights (1971–74).
The late essays collected in Scritti corsari (Corsair Writings, 1975) and Lettere luterane (Lutheran Letters, 1976, posthumous) are among the most controversial and widely read political writings of their decade in Italy. Pasolini's late argument — that postwar consumer capitalism had succeeded where fascism had failed in effacing the distinct cultures of the Italian peasantry and urban poor, substituting a standardized and hedonic "false tolerance" — was sharply attacked from both left and right and has become, in the decades since, one of the most cited critiques of neoliberalism from the cultural left. He was murdered on the beach at Ostia on the night of 1–2 November 1975, shortly after finishing Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom — the most violent of his films, reading Sade's text through the history of the final months of Italian fascism. The circumstances of his death remain disputed.