Giovanni Papini

A friend and collaborator of Giuseppe Prezzolini, who founded with him the two journals Leonardo (1903) and La Voce (1908), Giovanni Papini had relations of mutual exchange with American culture. He helped for example to import to Italy the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce and especially William James, that he met in Rome in 1905, and who considered Papini a privileged interlocutor of his philosophical speculation. The first publishing appearance of his work in the United States is, not surprisingly, the anthology Four and Twenty Minds. Essays (Thomas Y. Crowell Company Publishers, 1922), which includes, among the others, two essays on English philosophy (on George Berkeley and Herbert Spencer) and one on Walt Whitman.

The following year, while Prezzolini was first called to Columbia University, Dorothy Canfield Fisher translated the newly-converted Papini's Life of Christ (Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1923), which quickly became a best-seller in the US market. The success of the volume ushered in a season of strong interest in Papini's work, whose masterpiece The Failure was soon translated (Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1924). In the mid-1930s, Papini's fame as a biographer was consolidated with the Canadian release of Dante vivo (The Macmillan Company of Canada, 1934), soon to be reissued by the same publisher in New York (The Macmillan Company, 1935).

The adherence of the writer to Italian fascism and the consequences of the war interrupted the fortunes of his work overseas. Despite the ideological bias, and as the attention to Papini shifts mostly to an academic level (especially from a philosophical point of view), The Devil is promptly translated in 1954 (Dutton), six years after the last release, that of The Letters of Pope Celestine VI to All Mankind, for the same publisher (1948). As a consequence of the relative success of The Devil, The Life of Christ is soon republished in a paperback edition (Dell, 1957).

After Papini died, in 1956, the interest in his work seemed to subside, until at least the late 1960s. However, a well-known writer as Henry Miller, in Tropic of Cancer (released in the United States in 1961, by Grove Press), quoted Papini's name extensively, and with admiration. It is also worth mentioning the double release, in 1970 and 1971, of the anthology of essays published for the first time in 1922 (Books for Libraries Press, and Blom). In 1972, Greenwood Press reissued, without a great success, The Failure.

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