num_pages: 80
description: Sam Dunn is Dead was described by its author Bruno Corra (1892-1976) as a Futurist Novel and was first published in book form by Filippo Marinetti's Edizioni Futuriste in 1915. Yet one will search in vain for any mention of this work in anthologies of Futurism. The novel's erasure is doubtless because it is so unlike anything else produced by Futurism (an ardent masculine positive and absurdly serious movement). Sam Dunn is Dead a small masterpiece of black humor is none of these things.Not only is Sam Dunn at once funny despairing cerebral and ludicrous it also traces a history in miniature of the modern spirit. It commences with a description of its eponymous hero a languid 1890s poet who is about to unleash a thoroughly contemporary apocalypse upon the world. Subsequent chapters could be mistaken for Dadaist or Surrealist texts (but written a decade before their time) and then the whole edifice is fatally undermined by forces that are both banal and unusual (to avoid revealing too much). Corra subsequently considered his novel a failure but today his sensitivity to the great undertows of history seems alarmingly prescient and neither opinion should interfere with the reader's simple enjoyment of this novel's deliriously ebullient nihilism.
language: English
title: Sam Dunn Is Dead: Futurist Novel
publisher: Atlas Press