Luigi Pirandello was a playwright, novelist, short story writer, poet and one of the leading dramatists of the twentieth century. He was born in Girgenti [now Agrigento], Sicily, located on the south-central coast of the island on June 28, 1867. His father, owner of a rich sulfur mine, played an important role in the industrial and commercial life of Girgenti and Porto Empedocle. Being born into an economically well-to-do family promised him a comfortable childhood and adolescence, which allowed him privileges not enjoyed by many others.

After early private schooling at home, Pirandello attended secondary schools in Girgenti, and later, in Palermo. This was followed by studies at the University of Rome and the University of Bonn in Germany, where he was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree.

During this period of study, he wrote and published two volumes of poetry. Although his father wished him to follow a business career, he found no desire, pleasure or success in that pursuit. He settled in Rome as a professional writer in 1893.

In 1894, Pirandello married Antonietta Portulano. The marriage had been arranged by his father and a business associate in an attempt to unite the two families. The union was a loveless one. Luigi and Antonietta had hardly known each other, nor were they well matched in temperament or education. She was of a violent and capricious nature, which contrasted sharply with his gentleness and his erudition. Nevertheless, the first five years of marriage were relatively untroubled and produced three children, Stefano, Rosalie and Fausto.

During this period, however, a series of melancholy events developed, events that would eventually darken Pirandello's entire life. Most important, his father's business began to fail. He could no longer count on family financial support. To cope, in 1897, he took a post as a teacher of rhetoric at a teachers' college in Rome, a post he held first as an instructor, then as a professor until 1923.

All the while, more deeply painful events were taking place. His father went bankrupt in 1904; his wife suffered a nervous breakdown and became progressively more mentally unbalanced, with frequent hysterical attacks and wild accusations. To Pirandello's great credit, he did everything possible to soothe his wife and allay her fears and suspicions. He gave up his friends, stayed at home, and turned over his salary to her, except for a pittance which he kept for his bare essentials. But her condition continued to worsen and finally, in 1919, she was placed in a mental institution. He had endured his odyssey for 15 years.

Throughout the entire tragic period of Pirandello's family problems, a virtual hell on earth, he had continued to write, possibly as an escape. His early volumes of poems were followed by many other. His short stories and novels which were published in newspapers and magazines. His first novel, The Outcast, which he had written in 1893, was serialized in a Rome newspaper in 1901. This was followed by another novel and volumes of collected short stories. His most famous novel, The Late Mattia Pascal, established his literary reputation.

In spite of his increasing fame and improved finances, Pirandello was a very unhappy person. In an autobiographical sketch, he described his life as a colorless existence broken only by daily walks. Believing that life was rendered ridiculous by self deception, Pirandello filled his writings with "bitter compassion for all those who fool themselves." He was forty-two when he penned his autobiographical sketch and had not yet entered upon his career as a dramatist.

With the beginning of the "dramatist phase" of his life, Pirandello used his plays to reflect his personal life philosophy and the irony and bitterness of self-deception. The depth of his philosophical outlook can be seen throughout his more than forty plays. From approximately 1910, he devoted most of his time to writing plays. He worked intensely and rapidly. In one year he wrote nine plays, two of which were written in a nine day period, one in three days, the other in six days. The financial rewards of his play writing eventually freed him from his burden of having to teach.

Pirandello's most prolific writing period was between 1916 and 1925. In 1925, patronized by Mussolini, he founded his own theater in Rome. This venture, while artistically successful, proved financially disastrous. By this time, however, his fame had spread to North and South America, throughout Europe and as far as Japan. His works were being translated into many languages. In 1934, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In all, Pirandello wrote forty-three plays, many of which stress the paradox that illusion is often more real than reality. His most famous play, Six Characters in Search of an Author [1922], has long been recognized as a landmark in the 20th century theater.

In addition to his forty-three plays, Pirandello wrote and had published seven novels, 232 short stories, works of criticism, and about four hundred pages of collected poetry. Many of his short stories deal with his life in Sicily and are written in brilliant, powerfully incisive prose. Of all his writings, the world has not been mistaken in giving the most attention to his so-called "philosophical plays," written between 1917 and 1924. Among these, the agreed masterworks are: Right You Are; Six Characters in Search of an Author; and Enrico IV [Henry the Fourth].

In his will, Pirandello requested the simplest of funerals, with his body cremated and the ashes to be dispersed or "be walled up in one of the rough stones of the countryside of Girgenti where I was born."

Luigi Pirandello died in Rome on December 10, 1936.

Peter J. Ingeneri

A PUBLICATION of the PIRANDELLO LYCEUM Institute of Italian American Studies, Research and Cultural Disemmination.