Italian · 1867–1936
Luigi Pirandello shattered theatrical convention. The Sicilian playwright and novelist won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934 for "his bold and brilliant renovation of the drama and the stage." "Six Characters in Search of an Author" (1921) put unfinished characters onstage demanding their story be told; "Henry IV" (1922) trapped a man in permanent performance of madness. His novel "The Late Mattia Pascal" (1904) follows a man who fakes his death and discovers he cannot become someone else. Pirandello's themes—illusion, identity, the impossibility of fixed truth—anticipate absurdism and postmodernism.