Luigi Pirandello

Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936)was born in Sicily in a prosperous middle-class family. After studying at Palermo, Rome and Bonn universities he devoted himself to literary pursuits and published, poetry, short stories, a novel and plays. The bankruptcy of his father in 1903 drastically altered his life. His wife became ill both mentally and physically and he contemplated committing suicide. It is against this background that he wrote The Late Mattia Pascal in 1904 which is seen as the beginning of all that is most interesting in his work. It was an immediate success in Italy and abroad and helped him become a well-known literary figure. Now best known for plays like Six Characters in Search of an Author he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934. His vast output of novels and short stories contain the ideas that surface in his plays.

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