SOURCE: "The Author of Pinocchio," in The Saturday Review of Literature, Vol. XXI, No. 17, February 17, 1940, pp. 14-15.

In the essay following, Prezzolini describes the biography of Collodi as it relates to the creation of Pinocchio.

The name of Pinocchio has been familiar to children the world over for the past generation; and it may be said that there isn't a grown-up who has been through school who hasn't heard the story, either told in his own language or shown on the screen, of the wooden marionette who becomes a boy. Even Soviet Russia has given us a version.

Yet no one ever asks who its author was, and few men, outside of Italy, can tell you anything about him. Even a scholar like Carl Van Doren, in the preface to a deluxe edition of Pinocchio—as beautiful typographically as misleading in its illustrations—confesses knowing "very little concerning...