Luigi Pirandello

Luigi Pirandello was a Sicilian who taught in Rome, supported a wife who went mad after the family sulphur mine flooded, and wrote novels, three hundred stories and forty plays, of which Six Characters in Search of an Author of 1921 is the one that changed the theatre: a family of unfinished characters interrupts a rehearsal and demands that their story be staged. Reality and illusion, the self and its masks, were his subject in every form. He joined the Fascist party and then kept his distance from it, won the Nobel Prize in 1934, and asked to be cremated without ceremony.