SUMMARY

“Analyze life, tear its trappings off, lay it bare with thought, with logic, with philosophy, and its emptiness is revealed as a bottom­­less pit; its noth­ing­ness frankly confesses to nothing­ness, and Despair comes to perch in the soul as the Angel perched on the sepulcher left empty by the Son of God. So it happened with me; and with all the ardor of a growing youth I fortified myself in a negation of life.”

Giovanni Papini (Jan. 8, 1881–July 8, 1956) was an Italian journalist, essayist, novelist, short story writer, poet, literary critic, and philosopher. Un uomo finito (1913), translated by Virginia Pope in 1924 as The Failure, is Papini’s intellectual autobiography. It is the astonishing account of Papini’s personal development from an early age as he sets out as a child to acquire the totality of human knowledge through books, and later goes on to found a successful literary review with his friends, in time becoming one of his country’s leading intellectuals. As he becomes increasingly desparate in his attempt to find truth and meaning in philosophy and other disciplines, Papini blazes a crooked path through the stale -isms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.