SOURCE: "Luigi Pirandello as Writer of Short Fiction and Novels," in A Companion to Pirandello Studies, edited by John Louis DiGaetani, Greenwood Press, 1991, pp. 344-67.

In this excerpt, Radcliff-Umstead employs two examples, "The Journey" and "Happiness," to illustrate his assertion that Pirandello 's focus in his stories is "the failure or success of his fictional characters to reach an accord with life. "

Before his death Pirandello hoped to write a novella for each day of the year and to gather them in the series Novelle per un anno (Stories for a year). By 1937, the year after the writer's death, fifteen volumes had appeared in print. In all the author succeeded in completing 233 tales. The earliest story dates from his seventeenth year, and the final surrealistic dream stories belong to the last five years of the writer's life. Before being included in volumes, many of the tales originally appeared...