Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Ibsen grew up in a bankrupt household in a small Norwegian town, apprenticed to an apothecary, and spent twenty-seven years abroad, in Italy and Germany, writing the plays that made him the founder of modern drama. A Doll’s House, whose heroine walks out on her husband and children, scandalised Europe in 1879; The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder deepened the realism into something stranger. He wrote in prose about the drawing rooms of the middle class and made them the stage for the largest questions. Shaw and Joyce learned from him.