Luigi Pirandello
(1867–1936)

Luigi Pirandello is widely celebrated in Italy as the master of the short story. On top of this national fame, he is also considered one of the foremost dramatists of his time. He secured this credit in 1921 with his international masterpiece Six Characters in Search of an Author.

Pirandello was educated at the University of Rome and later received his doctorate from the University of Bonn in Germany. He wrote for ten years with the financial backing of his affluent family, but when his father became unable to support him, Pirandello became a professor of Italian.

He continued to write and earned success with the novel The Late Mattia Pascal (1904) and the play It Is So (If You Think So) (1917). During his lifetime, Pirandello proved to be a prolific writer, producing over forty plays and numerous works of fiction. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934, and upon his death two years later, his apartment in Rome was proclaimed a national monument. Many of Pirandello's works explore how the concepts of reality and illusion apply to self-identity. Pirandello is now a literary legacy, having inspired future generations of writers with the analytical nature of his work.

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