Luigi Pirandello

Luigi Pirandello was born in 1867 near Girgenti — today Agrigento — in Sicily, in a place called Caos; his father had prospered in the sulphur trade, and both parents’ families had fought for Italian unification and been embittered by what followed. He wrote his first tragedy at twelve, studied in Palermo and Rome, and after a quarrel with a professor moved to Bonn, where in 1891 he took a doctorate with a dissertation on the dialect of his native town.

In 1894 he married Antonietta Portulano. In 1903 the flooding of a sulphur mine in which the family fortune and her dowry were invested ruined them, and her mental health collapsed into lasting, jealous paranoia. The following year he published The Late Mattia Pascal, the novel of a man who seizes the chance to abandon his identity. His essay On Humour and hundreds of short stories explored the gap between the faces people wear and the shifting selves beneath. From the mid-1910s he turned increasingly to the stage: Right You Are (If You Think So) (1917) dramatised the impossibility of fixed truth, and Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), in which unfinished characters invade a rehearsal, caused uproar at its Rome premiere before conquering stages abroad. Henry IV (1922) followed, and the novel One, No One and One Hundred Thousand (1926).

Pirandello joined the Fascist Party in 1924 and directed Rome’s Teatro d’Arte with Mussolini’s help, but his relations with the regime soured and he remained under police surveillance. He received the Nobel Prize in 1934 and died in Rome two years later. His theatre is widely seen as a forerunner of the Theatre of the Absurd.