Although his fame rests mainly on revolutionary plays such as Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore (1921; translated as Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1922), Enrico IV (1922; translated as Henry IV, 1960), and Cosí è (Se vi pare)...

The works of the Italian playwright, novelist, and critic Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) generally portray Italian middle-class society. Combining relativistic thinking with a specific Pirandellian brand of humor, he probed the conflict between essence...

Luigi Pirandello. Contemporary Perspectives. Ed. by GIAN-PAOLO BIASIN and MANUELA GIERI. Toronto, Buffalo, NY, and London: University of Toronto Press. 1999. 232 pp. This volume of essays brings together an impressive list of international scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, including...

A few years before his death in 1936, Luigi Pirandello wrote in a private notebook, "There is somebody who's living my life. And I know nothing about him." He had already received enormous international acclaim as the author of the plays Henry IV,...

In the space of this column, we like to make room for any manner of Internet bizarre, from allegedly sexually deviant operatic R&B singers to chipmunks with gifts for the dramatic arts.But even dancing Wonder Women and Tetris-shaped Japanese game show contestants can be left...

In the following excerpt, Moestrup highlights some of the most significant stories written by Pirandello between 1910 and 1916, a period that the critic perceives as the middle phase of Pirandello's career as a short fiction writer.

Women as objects of desire, scorn, fear, as victims or as traps; conflicts arising over pregnancy and female identity—these lie at the very heart of Pirandello's dramatic plots. The triangular basis of a number of plays (old man-young woman-young man; husband-wife-lover) might place Pirandello squarely in the tradition of both classical and boulevard comedy were it not for the absence of, or at least the lack of emphasis on, romantic love. For Pirandello there can be no comic resolution, no a...

He appealed not because he flouted tradition but because his art mirrored, and put to discussion, the problems of his age. It is here that we have to see his importance; all other aspects of his work are secondary.