A novel of ten years, written alongside the theater
The novel was worked out between 1916 and 1926, appeared in installments in the magazine La Fiera Letteraria in 1925 and 1926, and came out as a book in 1926. It is Pirandello's last novel. In those years he was in his great theatrical phase: Six Characters in Search of an Author premiered in 1921, and the novel returns, almost obsessively, to situations he had already worked through in fiction and on stage. Pirandello received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934 and died in 1936.
The question of an entire body of work
Pirandello's single subject, in his theater, novels, and short stories, is human identity: who am I? The Late Mattia Pascal put it on stage in another way, with a man who is reported dead, abandons his own name, and invents another, and who fails because no one can live without papers, a past, and a family. In One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand the escape does not lead outward: Moscarda does not need a false death to stop being one, because he discovers he never was.
From Sicilian naturalism to the end of the character as civil record
Pirandello's early stories and novels, such as The Outcast and The Turn, tell regional tales with Sicilian types, along the path opened by the Sicilian Verga, author of The House by the Medlar Tree, and the characters who matter in them are the misfits and the solitary, those who learn early to see themselves living. Pirandello carries Verga's naturalism as far as the point where the character loses psychological homogeneity, and a little-known remark of his sums up the path: art continues nature. Hence the formula that he destroyed the état civil that Balzac had introduced into literature, that is, the character's identity card, with name, profession, character, and past.
What documents say about a person
In Italian civil-registry language, a citizen's public data (name, nationality, class, marital status, age, height, eye color) are called generalità. The novel makes this inventory from the inside: in Book III, Moscarda lists his date of birth, his baptism, his marriage at twenty-three, his height of one meter and sixty-eight and his red hair, and shows that the data say nothing to whoever reads them; in Book IV, he takes the discovery to the office of the notary Stampa.
Where and when it takes place
The action takes place in a provincial town called Richieri, which the text does not place in any region, under the reign of Victor Emmanuel III, and the narrator tells everything from an almshouse, after the crisis has passed, to a reader addressed as «gentlemen». Vitangelo is twenty-eight when his wife speaks to him about his nose. The man already flies in a machine, and he describes the airplane as a novelty that draws cries of victory (chapter X of Book II).
The title and the choice
In an interview given in Rio de Janeiro in December 1927, during the tour of the Teatro d'Arte di Roma, Pirandello said that the multiplicity of personality was for him an observation, not a conclusion, and that he was not an author of farces but of tragedies. Tragedy, he said, lies in the law that obliges man to be one: each of us can be one, none, or a hundred thousand, but the choice is imperative, and it costs the sacrifice of all the lives one might have lived. The novel dramatizes that choice and leaves it without a conclusion.