The Adventures of Pinocchio

Geppetto, an impoverished old woodcarver, carves a marionette that springs immediately to life as Pinocchio, a naive, impulsive puppet who lies constantly, a habit that makes his nose grow longer with every falsehood, skips school at the first opportunity, and falls for every con artist he crosses paths with on the way to nowhere in particular. The Talking Cricket tries early on to warn him toward better behavior and is killed for his trouble, though he returns later as something like a ghost still offering advice Pinocchio still will not take, and the scheming Fox and Cat repeatedly rob and trick him despite his having been fooled by them before. A forest spirit, the Fairy with Turquoise Hair, rescues Pinocchio more than once and eventually all but adopts him, and Geppetto himself is swallowed whole by an enormous sea creature Collodi calls the Terrible Dogfish while searching the ocean for his missing puppet son. Pinocchio finds his father alive inside the creature, engineers their escape, and afterward gives up his own money to help the ailing Fairy rather than spend it on himself, an act of real selflessness that finally earns him what the whole book has been building toward. He dreams the Fairy comes to him one last time, and wakes to find his wooden body lying lifeless on a chair beside him, because he has become, at last, a real boy.

Collodi originally ended the story far more grimly, with Pinocchio hanged from an oak tree for his endless faults at the close of chapter fifteen, and only resumed the serial after readers demanded to know what happened next, writing fifteen further chapters that soften the ending into the redemption story now generally known. The book mixes genuine fairy tale wonder with turns that stay startlingly dark for children's fiction, and its moral lessons are delivered with a bluntness that has not aged the way its inventiveness has.

Pinocchio's lengthening nose has become one of the most universally recognized images in world literature, shorthand for a lie the moment anyone draws it.