Luigi Pirandello

Early life

Pirandello was born into an upper-class family in Girgenti (now Agrigento), Sicily, near the poor suburb of Porto Empedocle. His family's surname had originally been the Greek "Pirangelos" (Greek: Πυράγγελος), which had been phonetically corrupted. Pirandello was of Greek descent, as he noted himself in an interview to Kostas Ouranis in 1934.
The area of his birth was called "Caos", from càusi, Sicilian for "trousers", after the shape of a nearby ravine. His father, Stefano Pirandello, belonged to a wealthy family involved in the sulphur industry, and his mother, Caterina Ricci Gramitto, was also of a well-to-do background, descending from a family of the bourgeois professional class of Agrigento. Both families, the Pirandellos and the Ricci Gramittos, were ferociously anti-Bourbon and actively participated in the struggle for unification and democracy (Risorgimento). Stefano participated in the famous Expedition of the Thousand, later following Garibaldi all the way to the battle of Aspromonte, and Caterina, who had hardly reached the age of thirteen, was forced to accompany her father to Malta, where he had been sent into exile by the Bourbon monarchy. But the open participation in the Garibaldian cause and the strong sense of idealism of those early years were quickly transformed, above all in Caterina, into an angry and bitter disappointment with the new reality created by the unification. Pirandello would eventually assimilate this sense of betrayal and resentment and express it in several of his poems and in his novel The Old and the Young. It is also probable that this climate of disillusion inculcated in the young Luigi the sense of disproportion between ideals and reality which is recognizable in his essay on humorism (L'Umorismo).

Pirandello…

On 14 July 1930, a version of his short play The Man with the Flower in His Mouth, adapted and produced by Lance Sieveking, co-produced with John Logie Baird's company and starring Val Gielgud and Lionel Millard, became the first drama broadcast in both picture and sound when the British Broadcasting Corporation showed it for London audiences.
Pirandello was nominated Academic of Italy in 1929, and in 1934 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature after he had been nominated by Guglielmo Marconi, member of the Royal Academy of Italy. He was the last Italian playwright to be chosen for the award until Dario Fo won on 9 October 1997.
Pirandello died alone in his home at Via Bosio, Rome, on 10 December 1936. He refused a State funeral offered by Mussolini and only in 1947 were his cremated remains buried in Sicily.
In the context of playwriting during the early and mid-1900s, Pirandello's impact is notable. Pirandello inspired playwrights such as Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to write plays that echo the themes of existential exploration and metaphysical questioning that he focused on in his works. His influence goes beyond playwrights; French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was also inspired by Pirandello's ideas to explore one of the main pillars of his philosophy: existentialism. The playwright's portrayal of fractured identities and the ambiguity of existence in his plays served as inspiration for Sartre's concepts of freedom, authenticity, and existential angst. Pirandello's character narratives and metaphysical themes not only aligned with but also enriched Sartre's philosophical discourses, creating a link between existential thought in theater and philosophy, where each medium deepened and reflected upon the complexities and theories of the other. The…

Major plays
1916: Liolà
1917: Così è (se vi pare) (So It Is (If You Think So))
1917: Il piacere dell'onestà (The Pleasure of Honesty)
1918: Il gioco delle parti (The Rules of the Game)
1919: L'uomo, la bestia e la virtù (Man, Beast and Virtue)
1921: Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author)
1922: Enrico IV (Henry IV)
1922: L'imbecille (The Imbecile)
1922: Vestire gli ignudi (To Clothe the Naked)
1923: L'uomo dal fiore in bocca (The Man with the Flower in His Mouth)
1923: L'altro figlio (The Other Son)
1923: La vita che ti diedi (The Life I Gave You)
1924: Ciascuno a suo modo (Each in His Own Way)
1924: Sagra del Signore della Nave (The Rite of the Lord of the Ship)
1926: L'Amica delle Mogli (The Friend of the Wives)
1926: Bellavita (Bellavita)
1927: Diana e la Tuda (Diana and Tuda)
1929: O di Uno o di Nessuno (Either of One or of None)
1929: Come Tu Mi Vuoi (How You Love Me)
1930: Questa sera si recita a soggetto (Tonight We Improvise)

Novels
1902: The Turn (original title: Il turno)
1904: The Late Mattia Pascal (original title: Il fu Mattia Pascal)
1908: The Outcast (original title L'esclusa)
1911: Suo marito (Her Husband)
1913: I vecchi e i giovani (The Old and the Young)
1915: Si Gira, Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio (Shoot!, The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator, 1926 English translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff)
1926: One, No One and One Hundred Thousand (original title: Uno, nessuno e centomila)

Short stories
1922–37: Novelle per un anno (Short Stories for a Year), 15 volumes. A selection of thirty stories was translated by Virginia Jewiss as Stories for the Years (Yale, 2021).

Poetry
1889: Mal giocondo (Playful Evil)
1891: Pasqua di Gea (Easter of Gea)
1894: Pier Gudrò, 1809–1892
1895: Elegie renane, 1889–90…

Il crollo, directed by Mario Gargiulo (Italy, 1920, based on the play Lumie di Sicilia)
Il lume dell'altra casa, directed by Ugo Gracci (Italy, 1920, based on the short story Il lume dell'altra casa)
Lo scaldino, directed by Augusto Genina (Italy, 1920, based on the short story Lo scaldino)
But It Isn't Serious, directed by Augusto Camerini (Italy, 1921, based on the play Ma non è una cosa seria)
La rosa, directed by Arnaldo Frateili (Italy, 1921, based on the short story La rosa)
The Voyage, directed by Gennaro Righelli (Italy, 1921, based on the short story Il viaggio)
Feu Mathias Pascal, directed by Marcel L'Herbier (France, 1925, based on the novel Il fu Mattia Pascal)
The Flight in the Night, directed by Amleto Palermi (Germany, 1926, based on the play Enrico IV)
The Song of Love, directed by Gennaro Righelli (Italy, 1930, based on the short story In silenzio)
La Dernière berceuse, directed by Gennaro Righelli and Jean Cassagne (France, 1931, based on the short story In silenzio)
Liebeslied, directed by Constantin J. David (Germany, 1931, based on the short story In silenzio)
As You Desire Me, directed by George Fitzmaurice (1932, based on the play Come tu mi vuoi)
Steel, directed by Walter Ruttmann (Italy, 1933, based on the story Giuoca, Pietro!)
Pensaci, Giacomino!, directed by Gennaro Righelli (Italy, 1936, based on the play Pensaci, Giacomino!)
But It's Nothing Serious, directed by Mario Camerini (Italy, 1936, based on the play Ma non è una cosa seria)
The Man Who Couldn't Say No, directed by Mario Camerini (Germany, 1938, based on the play Ma non è una cosa seria)
The Man from Nowhere, directed by Pierre Chenal (France, 1937, based on the novel Il fu Mattia Pascal)
The Former Mattia Pascal, directed by Pierre Chenal (Italy, 1937, based on the novel Il fu…