My book project discusses three mid-twentieth-century authors whose engagement with failure counters the prevailing narrative surrounding failure today. Rather than approaching failure as a step towards success, within a larger narrative of redemption that effaces the significance of the moment of failure in favor of its ultimate results, I argue that the type of failure present in the works of John Williams, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Bruno Jasieński produces political effects that can be meaningful precisely if we adopt a non-teleological perspective. Even though those effects do not extend to the utopian future, they point to larger contradictions within the ideologies of success and progress that they respond to.