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The Failure (Un uomo finito)
1913 · 349 pages
The Failure (Un uomo finito)
by Giovanni Papini
About the text. In the free scan at least 1 word in 190 is garbled. We count it so you can judge the scan before you spend time in it. The full text is public domain and free — linked below.
On this page: a summary of The Failure (Un uomo finito), and which translation this edition uses.
Giovanni Papini's fierce autobiography of his years as a Florentine atheist provocateur — the prodigy who set out to demolish every faith and ended, by his own reckoning, a “finished man.” Written before his later conversion, a contemporary called it “a vestibule to the Life of Christ”: the firsthand record of the unbelief he would renounce. (English translation, 1924.)
The changed life
A celebrated anticlerical intellectual who edited journals dedicated to attacking Christianity, then converted to Catholicism and wrote a best-selling Life of Christ — the provocateur turned apologist.
Summary
The Failure (Un uomo finito) is Giovanni Papini's fierce autobiography of his years as a Florentine intellectual provocateur — a prodigy who set out to master and then demolish every philosophy and faith, and who ends, by his own reckoning, a 'finished man.' Published in Italian in 1913, it captures the mind of a militant atheist before his later turn to Christ.
Papini charts an insatiable youthful ambition: to know everything, to found systems, to become a kind of god of the intellect — and the successive disillusionments that left each ambition in ruins. It is a self-portrait of pride, brilliance, and despair, written with the same combative energy he had aimed at the beliefs he attacked.
The conversion itself sits at the edges of the book rather than at its center; Papini wrote it before he entered the Catholic Church. A contemporary called it 'a vestibule to the Life of Christ' — the firsthand record of the unbelief Papini would later renounce, which is why it belongs among the accounts of changed lives.
Who was Giovanni Papini?
Giovanni Papini (1881–1956) was an Italian writer, editor, and critic at the center of early-twentieth-century Florentine intellectual life, associated with pragmatism and the Futurist ferment and known as an aggressive anticlerical and atheist. He edited influential avant-garde journals and made his name attacking established beliefs.
Un uomo finito (1913) belongs to that militant phase. Some years later Papini converted to Catholicism and, in 1921, published the best-selling Storia di Cristo (Life of Christ) — the provocateur turned apologist. The English translation of his autobiography appeared in 1924 as The Failure.
Which translation of The Failure (Un uomo finito) is this?
Our edition presents a clean, readable presentation of the public-domain 1924 English translation in clear type, and we link to a free source so you can read Papini's self-portrait.
Common questions
- Who was Giovanni Papini?
- Giovanni Papini (1881–1956) was an Italian writer who was a militant atheist and anticlerical provocateur before converting to Catholicism and writing the best-selling Life of Christ (1921).
- Does The Failure describe his conversion?
- Only at its edges — Papini wrote Un uomo finito (1913) before he entered the Church. It is the record of the ambition and unbelief he would later renounce, which a contemporary called 'a vestibule to the Life of Christ.'
A note on the text. The Failure (Un uomo finito) is in the public domain. The text below is free to read at the source we link. The original text is also available free here.
That free text is already well proofread — we measure about 1.5 errors per 1,000 characters. We publish the measurement so you can judge the free text for yourself.
Related reading
What he wrote afterwards
Life of Christ (Storia di Cristo)
Giovanni Papini · 1921
The book Papini wrote after his conversion: a life of Christ by the man who had spent years attacking the church, and an international bestseller.
Related collections