Although his early writings had an arresting quality, it was not until he undertook to edit some Italian classics published under the title of "I Nostri Scrittori" ("Our Writers") that they began to take on the features that have since become characteristic and which have been described by his admirers as "rugged, vigorous, virile, rich, neologistic," and everything else the antithesis of pussy-foot. This feature, if feature it can be called, showed itself first in "L'Uomo Finito," a book which is admitted to be an autobiography. It introduces us to an ugly, sensitive, introspective, mentally prehensile child of shut-in personality who is not only egocentric at seven but who loves and exalts himself and despises and disparages others. This unlovable child with an insatiate appetite for information found his way to a public library and determined to write an encyclopædia of all knowledge. His juvenile frenzy came its first cropper when he reached the letter "B," and he was submerged with the Bible and with God. The task was too big, he had to admit, but his ambition to accomplish some great and thorough piece of work was undaunted. He began a compendium of religions, then of literature, and last of the Romance languages. These successive attempts at completeness are typical of Papini's far-reaching ambitions. "The Played-Out Man" is a record of his plunge into one absorption after another. He discovered evil, and planned not only individual suicide but suicide of the people _en masse_. Next came the desire for love. His instincts were of a sort not to be satisfied by the conventional sweetness of "I Promessi Sposi," but from Poe, Walt Whitman, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Dostoievsky, and Anatole France he got a vicarious appeasement of the sentiment he craved. Then he encountered "dear Julian." "We never kissed each other and we never cried together," but he could not forgive Julian for allowing his friend to learn of his matrimony only through the _Corriere della Sera_. The brief emotional episode past, Papini's life interest swung back to philosophy. He discovered Monism, and believed it like a religion. Then Kant became his ideal, then Berkeley, Mill, Plato, Locke, culminating in the glorified egotism of Max Stirner. After Stirner philosophy has no more to say. Down with it all! It is necessary to liberate the world from the yoke of these mumblers, just as Papini has liberated himself. But how to do it! Ah, yes! Found a journal that will purge the world of its sins, as the Great Revolution purged France of royalty.