Luigi Pirandello

Luigi Pirandello is the Nobel Prize-winning author of more than 40 plays, and hundreds of stories and novels. The son of a wealthy business-owner in Sicily, in his youth Pirandello planned to be a lawyer, however he changed his direction during his tumultuous years at the University of Rome, and turned his attention to writing.

After several years of literary success with his novels and poetry, Pirandello began writing plays in the late 1880's. Because Pirandello wrote most of his early plays in the Sicilian dialect, their influence was limited. His best-known play, Six Characters in Search of an Author, was first produced in Italian 1921, and later went on to be translated and presented around the world. His tragicomic plays are now seen as some of the earliest examples of Absurdist theatre. Pirandello's works are deeply concerned with matters of truth and fiction, and the intermingling of art and reality.