The chapter makes a case for Pirandello as the head of an Italian school of fantastic literature that came into being at the end of the nineteenth century. It recounts Pirandello’s use of the fantastic – characteristically without the supernatural – as a tool for distancing himself from the naturalism of the period and as a literary strategy that shared much with the humorism that was likewise dear to Pirandello. Both the fantastic and the humoristic relied on the perception of life’s contrasts to slowly overturn an understanding of the laws of the universe. Focusing on the Stories for a Year, the chapter traces the sometimes uneasy coexistence of the fantastic and humoristic, chronicles Pirandello’s original recreation of fantastic situations and environments in a wholly Sicilian imaginary, and reflects on how the fantastic itself becomes a metaphor for literary creation.

This chapter explores a key aspect of Pirandello’s relationship with the Fascist regime. In 1926, Benito Mussolini created the Royal Italian Academy (the Academy), to rival the prestigious national academies of other European countries such as France and Britain. Pirandello was the most famous appointee amongst the first thirty nominations of accademici in March 1929. The chapter traces Pirandello’s ambivalent attitude toward the Academy. On the one hand, he considered it just recognition of both his fame as an author and his early support of Fascism. On the other, he was skeptical of the usefulness of a national academy, especially if it bent to the will of the Fascist regime. The chapter reconstructs several episodes showing how Pirandello’s status as an accademico was related to his hopes of taking a leading role in the renewal of Italian theatre. His correspondence with his son Stefano and his confidant and muse Marta Abba reveals Pirandello’s low opinion of the rhetoric and emptiness of Fascist cultural policies, of which the Academy was a prime example.

This chapter treats Pirandello’s relationship with his good friend, fellow writer, and collaborator on the Teatro d’Arte, Massimo Bontempelli. It addresses the aesthetic and political views and life experiences that united them and reframes the dominant notion of early twentieth-century Italian playwrights as lesser pirandellisti. Describing their influence as mutual, the chapter explores both authors’ treatment of myth and the modern masses in works including The Festival of Our Lord of the Ship, The Mountain Giants, Nostra Dea, and Valòria. Finally, it covers Bontempelli’s magisterial analysis of his friend’s writing in the eulogy Pirandello, o del candore.