Six Characters in Search of an Author

by Luigi Pirandello, Eric Bentley (Translator), Eric Bentley (Introduction)

Overview

This 1921 intellectual comedy contrasts illusion with reality by introducing six individuals to a bare stage occupied by actors in rehearsal. Proclaiming themselves the incomplete creations of an author's imagination, the six demand dialog for the story of their lives. A classic dramatic exploration of the many faces of reality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780451526885
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/01/1998
Series:	Signet Classics Series
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	4.18(w) x 6.72(h) x 0.29(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) was an Italian playwright, novelist, and poet. Born to a wealthy Sicilian family in the village of Cobh, Pirandello was raised in a household dedicated to the Garibaldian cause of Risorgimento. Educated at home as a child, he wrote his first tragedy at twelve before entering high school in Palermo, where he excelled in his studies and read the poets of nineteenth century Italy. After a tumultuous period at the University of Rome, Pirandello transferred to Bonn, where he immersed himself in the works of the German romantics. He began publishing his poems, plays, novels, and stories in earnest, appearing in some of Italy’s leading literary magazines and having his works staged in Rome. Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), an experimental absurdist drama, was viciously opposed by an outraged audience on its opening night, but has since been recognized as an essential text of Italian modernist literature. During this time, Pirandello was struggling to care for his wife Antonietta, whose deteriorating mental health forced him to place her in an asylum by 1919. In 1924, Pirandello joined the National Fascist Party, and was soon aided by Mussolini in becoming the owner and director of the Teatro d’Arte di Roma. Although his identity as a Fascist was always tenuous, he never outright abandoned the party. Despite this, he maintained the admiration of readers and critics worldwide, and was awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Editorial Reviews

Ingenious...a striking re-imagining of Six Characters that heightens the play's theatricality even as it grounds it in the mundane.... It keeps faith with Pirandello's case for the peculiarly irresistible power of illusion.

The New York Times

Ingenious...a striking re-imagining of Six Characters that heightens the play's theatricality even as it grounds it in the mundane.... It keeps faith with Pirandello's case for the peculiarly irresistible power of illusion.

New York Times