Luigi Pirandello was an Italian dramatist, novelist, poet and short story writer.
Background
Luigi Pirandello was born on June 28, 1867, in Girgenti (now Agrigento), Sicily, Italy. His father, Stefano, belonged to a wealthy family involved in the sulphur industry and his mother, Caterina Ricci Gramitto, was also of a well-to-do background, descending from a family of the bourgeois professional class of Agrigento. Both families, the Pirandellos and the Ricci Gramittos, were ferociously anti-Bourbon and actively participated in the struggle for unification and democracy.
Education
Pirandello received his elementary education at home but was much more fascinated by the fables and legends that his elderly servant Maria Stella used to recount to him than by anything scholastic or academic. At the insistence of his father, he was registered at a technical school but eventually switched to the study of the humanities at the ginnasio.
In 1880, the Pirandello family moved to Palermo. It was here, in the capital of Sicily, that Luigi completed his high school education. Pirandello then registered at the University of Palermo in the departments of Law and Letters. Because of a conflict with a Latin professor, he was forced to leave the University of Rome and went to Bonn with a letter of presentation from one of his other professors. In March 1891 he received his doctorate in Romance Philology.
Pirandello’s first widely acclaimed novel, The Late Mattia Pascal, was written in 1904. Within the next ten years, up until the First World War, he published two other novels and numerous short stories. Pirandello accepted a position as professor of Italian at Rome's R. Istituto di Magistero Femminile and in 1908 obtained the chair of Italian language and stylistics at the same institution.
In 1916 Luigi first focused his attention on the theater and quickly became enthralled by the possibilities it presented. Inspired, Pirandello wrote nine plays in one year, including his first three plays, Better Think Twice About It!, Liola, and It is So!, If You Think So, which were all each written in less than a week. In 1920 he achieved critical success with As Before, Better than Before. In 1921 his career culminated, when he wrote his two masterpieces Six Characters in Search of an Author and Henry IV. Six Characters opened successfully but scandalously in Rome and later succeed with its opening in Milan as well.
In September of 1924 Luigi founded, with state support, the Teatro d'Arte di Roma, of which he became director. From this time dates his friendship with Marta Abba, the leading actress of the troupe and his muse. Mainly staging plays of Pirandello, the troupe went on several foreign tours, to England, France, and Germany (1925), to Vienna, Prague, and Budapest (1926), and to South America (1928). This venture proved too costly in the end, and the Teatro d'Arte was dissolved in 1928. Beginning with this year Pirandello took up frequent and extensive residences abroad, especially in Paris and Berlin. Pirandello died on December 10, 1936, in his Roman apartment.
In 1925 Luigi publicly stated to be "...a Fascist because I am Italian." Pirandello, with the help of Mussolini, assumed the artistic direction and ownership of the Teatro d'Arte di Roma.
However, a few years later he expressed publicly apolitical belief, saying "I'm apolitical, I'm only a man in the world..." He continuous conflicts with famous fascist leaders. In 1927 he tore his fascist membership card in pieces in front of the dazed secretary-general of the Fascist Party. In the remainder of his life, Pirandello was always under close surveillance by the secret fascist police OVRA.
Views
Quotations:
"This tree, I breathe shaking off the new leaves. I am this tree. Tree, cloud; tomorrow book or wind; the book that I read, the wind that I drink. All outside, wayward."
Membership
Luigi was member of the Royal Academy of Italy.
Personality
Luigi was a tall man with a pointed beard and piercing eyes. He also was analytical in nature and for the most part lacking in action.
Connections
Following Luigi's father's suggestion, in 1894 he married a shy, withdrawn girl of a good family of Agrigentine origin educated by the nuns of San Vincenzo: Antonietta Portulano. They had two sons, Stefano and Fausto, and a daughter Lietta.