Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello, (1867-1936). Italian dramatist and writer. The son of a mine owner, Pirandello was born in Sicily and studied in Rome and Bonn. Although family wealth enabled him to embark on a literary career in the 1890s, a mining disaster in 1903 reduced him and his wife to poverty. Shortly afterwards she began to show signs of insanity, leading to her eventual removal to an asylum. Pirandello was already known as a novelist and short-story writer when he turned to writing for the stage in 1910. His best-known play, Six Characters in Search of an Author, was premiered in Rome in 1921 and seen in London and New York the following year. The play is a paradoxical exploration of the nature of theatrical illusion. His other plays include the tragedy Henry IV (1922), which examines ideas of madness and sanity. Pirandello was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1934. With their anti-naturalist style his plays had a major influence on later writers, especially on the Theatre of the Absurd.
