page_title: Giovanni Papini
section_title: Before and during World War I
hierarchical_section_title: Giovanni Papini / Before and during World War I
caption_attribution_description: English: Caricature of G. Papini
context_page_description: Giovanni Papini was an Italian journalist, essayist, novelist, short story writer, poet, literary critic, and philosopher, is considered one of the controversial Italian literary figures of the early and mid-twentieth century and the earliest and most enthusiatic representative of Italian pragmatism. Among the founders of the journals Leonardo and Lacerba, he conceived literature as an "action" and gave his writings an oratory and irreverent tone. Though self-educated, he was considered influential iconoclastic editor and writer, leading in Italian futurism, he participated in the early literary movements of youth. A living part of the literary, foreign philosophical and political movements, such as the French intuitionism of Bergson and the Anglo-American pragmatism of Peirce and James, which at the beginning of the twentieth century promoted the aging of Italian culture and life from Florence, in the name of an individualistic and dreamy conception of life and art, and a spokesman in Roman Catholic religious belief.
context_section_description: After leaving Il Leonardo in 1907, Giovanni Papini founded several other magazines. First he published La Voce in 1908, then L'Anima together with Giovanni Amendola and Prezzolini. In 1913 (right before Italy's entry into World War I) he started Lacerba (1913–15). From three years Papini was correspondent for the Mercure de France and later literary critic for La Nazione. About 1918 he created yet another review, La Vraie Italie, with Ardengo Soffici.
  Other books came from his pen. His Parole e Sangue ("Words and Blood") showed his fundamental atheism. Furthermore, Papini sought to create scandal by speculating that Jesus and John the Apostle had a homosexual relationship. In 1912 he published his best-known work, the autobiography Un Uomo Finito ("The Failure").
  In his 1915 collection of poetic prose Cento Pagine di Poesia (followed by Buffonate, Maschilità, and Stroncature), Papini placed himself face-to-face with Giovanni Boccaccio, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, but also contemporaries such as Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile, and less prominent disciples of Gabriele D'Annunzio. A critic wrote of him:
  Giovanni Papini [...] is one of the finest minds in the Italy of today. He is an excellent representative of modernity's restless search for truth, and his work exhibits a refreshing independence founded, not like so much so-called independence, upon ignorance of the past, but upon a study and understanding of it.
  He published verse in 1917, grouped under the title Opera Prima. In 1921, Papini announced his newly found Roman Catholicism, publishing his Storia di Cristo ("The Story of Christ"), a book which has been translated into twenty-three languages and has had a worldwide success.
  After further verse works, he published the satire Gog (1931) and the essay Dante Vivo ("Living Dante", or "If Dante Were Alive"; 1933).
caption: Drawing of Papini, by Julius Zirinsky.
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