SOURCE: "Henry IV—The Tragic Humorist," in A Companion to Pirandello Studies, edited by John Louis DiGaetani, Greenwood Press, 1991, pp. 231-43.

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.

—Oscar Budel, in hisPirandello,1969.

Luigi Pirandello is generally considered one of the great seminal dramatists of the twentieth century, ranked along-side Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, and Brecht. Plays like Six

Characters in Search of an Author and Henry IV have been widely translated and produced frequently by both professionals and amateurs. Outside Italy, it is perhaps less widely known that Pirandello was also a gifted prose writer, producing no less than 7 novels and 14 collections of...