Born at Skien, Norway, in 1828, Henrik Ibsen was the son of a merchant family that for a few years of his life remained well-to-do. In 1836, however, Ibsen’s father went bankrupt and the now poverty-stricken family was forced to move to an isolated farm. Intending to become a doctor, the 15-year-old Ibsen was apprenticed to an apothecary at Grimstad where he lived until 1850. During that period, Ibsen fathered an illegitimate child, to whose financial support he contributed for 15 years. He also published his first play Catiline (1850). After failing his university entrance examinations for medicine, Ibsen turned to literature as a full-time pursuit and became artistic director of the struggling Christiana Norwegian Theater. In 1864, frustrated by the theater’s failure and other professional tribulations, Ibsen, now married with a son, left Norway for a lengthy, self-imposed exile. He spent 27 years abroad, during which Ibsen composed many of his best-known plays: Brand (1866), Peer Gynt (1867), The Pillars of Society (1877), A Dolls’ House (1879), and Ghosts (1881). The 1870s saw a maturing Ibsen move away from the romantic, phantasmagoric plays of his youth to the realistic, socially oriented works on which his modern reputation mainly rests.
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