In 1938 Bassani was studying literature in Bologna when racial laws were passed in Italy that restricted the activities of Jews, including banning them from universities. Bassani, who had to publish his early works under a pseudonym (Giacomo Marchi), became involved in the antifascist movement in the early 1940s and was briefly arrested in 1943. After World War II he settled in Rome, where he continued his writing career. In addition to writing novels, poetry, screenplays, and essays, he also edited several literary journals, including Bottega Oscura.

The collection Cinque storie ferraresi (1956; U.K. title, Prospect of Ferrara, U.S. title, Five Stories of Ferrara; reissued as Dentro le mura, 1973; “Inside the Wall”), five novellas that describe the growth of fascism and anti-Semitism, brought Bassani his first commercial success and the Strega Prize (offered annually for the best Italian literary work). The Ferrara setting recurs in Bassani's best-known book, the semiautobiographical Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (1962; The Garden of the Finzi-Continis; film, 1971). The narrator of this work contrasts his own middle-class Jewish family with the aristocratic, decadent Finzi-Continis, also Jewish, whose sheltered lives end in annihilation by the Nazis.

Bassani's later novels include L'airone (1968; The Heron), a portrait of a lonely Ferrarese landowner during a hunt. This novel received the Campiello Prize for best Italian prose work. Bassani also wrote L'odore del fieno (1972; The Smell of Hay). His collections of poetry include Rolls Royce and Other Poems (1982), which contains selections in English and Italian from earlier collections. Bassani's elegiac tone has frequently elicited comparison with those of Henry James and Marcel Proust, his acknowledged models.