Six Characters in Search of an Author | Author Biography

Luigi Pirandello was born in Sicily (the large island near the "toe" of Italy) on June 28, 1867, to a wealthy father who owned sulphur mines. Though his father wanted him to pursue a business career, Pirandello preferred academics and by 1891 had earned a Ph D. in linguistics, eventually spending many years of his life as a professor of Italian literature and language at a school for women in Rome.

Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello

In 1894 Pirandello's father arranged for his son to marry the daughter of his business partner, and Pirandello's resulting financial independence enabled him to live in Rome and pursue a writing career. Although he initially focused on poetry and short stones, Pirandello first achieved success as a writer in 1904 with the novel The Late Mattia Pascal. However, in 1903 floods in his father's sulphur mines had brought financial ruin to the Pirandellos and altered the playwright's life irrevocably. Pirandello's wife reacted to the catastrophe with an emotional breakdown from which she never recovered, spending the rest of her life in a condition of mental instability. His wife's condition made Pirandello's life miserable but also supplied him with the themes that would sustain the rest of his artistic career. Until he finally agreed to commit her to a mental institution in 1918 Pirandello was living with an insane wife who accused him of infidelity whenever he was out of her sight. This constant challenge to his sense of reality led Pirandello to investigate in his writings the question of personal identity and the relationship between madness and sanity and appearance and reality.

Pirandello became widely known in Italy as a poet, novelist, and short story writer, but around 1916, at the age of 49, he began writing more plays and when his famous themes appeared in his two dramatic masterpieces, Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) and Henry W (1922), Pirandello immediately became an international success, enabling him to create a theatrical troupe that performed his plays around the world. By the end of his life in 1936 Pirandello had wntten eight volumes of poems, seven novels, 250 short stories, and 44 plays. But it was mainly because of his internationally famous plays that Pirandello was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1934, two years before his death from pneumonia in Rome on December 10, 1936. Pirandello has had a profound effect on twentieth-century drama and especially on what would be called the Theatre of the Absurd. Having given eloquent testimony to the issues of the relativity of truth, the instability of personal identity, and the nature of stage illusion, Pirandello remains one of the most influential dramatists of the twentieth century.