Luigi Pirandello

Luigi Pirandello was born in Girgenti — now Agrigento — in 1867, into a Sicilian middle-class family that had seen revolution and then financial collapse. He studied Romance philology in Rome and Bonn, and began as a novelist before coming to the theatre. His work circles around the themes that would mark the twentieth century: identity coming apart, the social mask, the distance between what a person is and what others see.
The novels The Late Mattia Pascal (1904) and One, No One and One Hundred Thousand (1926), along with his Stories for a Year, had already made him known when Six Characters in Search of an Author split the Roman audience in 1921 and opened the way to modern theatre. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934. He died in Rome two years later, leaving precise instructions for a funeral without ceremony.