six characters in search of an author and other plays

A former Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellow, Musa is the author of a highly acclaimed translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. Mark Musa is a professor at the Center for Italian Studies at Indiana University. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934 and died in Rome on 10 December 1936. He embarked on a career as a producer and in 1925 founded his Art Theatre in Rome. In the following years Pirandello travelled abroad extensively. Henry IV followed the next year and confirmed his position as a playwright. Pirandello's first real success in the theatre came about in 1921 when Six Characters in Search of an Author was performed. The enormous emotional strain he felt at this time is reflected in the intense pessimism found in his work. Perhaps the best known of Luigi Pirandellos works, Six Charactersgives audiences a glimpse of a play rehearsal that takes a sudden dip into the surreal.

Only in 1918, when her presence in the family constituted a real threat to their daughter's safety did Pirandello agree to have his wife committed to an asylum. Financial disaster and a severe illness brought on by the birth of their third child drove his wife to a hysterical form of insanity. In 1894 he married Antoinetta Portulano, the daughter of his father's business associate. It was followed by other volumes of poems, critical essays, novels, short stories, and over forty plays. His first published work, Mal giocondo (1889), was a collection of poems. As a young man he studied at the Universities of Palermo, Rome, and Bonn, where he gained his doctorate in 1891. Luigi Pirandello was born of rich, middle-class parents in Girgenti (Agrigento), Sicily, on 28 June 1867.

Six characters in search of an author and other plays