26 Facts About Luigi Pirandello

Luigi Pirandello was awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art".

Luigi Pirandello was born into an upper-class family in Girgenti, Sicily, near the poor suburb of Porto Empedocle.

Luigi Pirandello was of Greek descent, as he noted himself in an interview to Kostas Ouranis in 1934.

Luigi Pirandello received his elementary education at home, but was much more fascinated by the fables and legends, somewhere between popular and magic, that his elderly servant Maria Stella used to recount to him than by anything scholastic or academic.

Luigi Pirandello began reading omnivorously, focusing, above all, on 19th-century Italian poets such as Giosue Carducci and Arturo Graf.

Luigi Pirandello then started writing his first poems and fell in love with his cousin Lina.

In 1886, during a vacation from school, Luigi Pirandello went to visit the sulphur mines of Porto Empedocle and started working with his father.

Luigi Pirandello then registered at the University of Palermo in the departments of Law and of Letters.

Luigi Pirandello, who was an extremely sensitive moralist, finally had a chance to see for himself the irreducible decadence of the so-called heroes of the Risorgimento in the person of his uncle Rocco, now a greying and exhausted functionary of the prefecture who provided him with temporary lodgings in Rome.

Luigi Pirandello read the German romantics, Jean Paul, Tieck, Chamisso, Heinrich Heine and Goethe.

Luigi Pirandello began translating the Roman Elegies of Goethe, composed the Elegie Boreali in imitation of the style of the Roman Elegies, and he began to meditate on the topic of humorism by way of the works of Cecco Angiolieri.

Luigi Pirandello married in 1894, choosing a shy, withdrawn girl of a good family of Agrigentine origin educated by the nuns of San Vincenzo: Maria Antonietta Portulano.

In 1911, while the publication of novellas and short stories continued, Luigi Pirandello finished his fourth novel, Suo Marito, republished posthumously, and completely revised in the first four chapters, with the title Giustino Roncella nato Boggiolo.

In 1919 Luigi Pirandello had his wife placed in an asylum.

Luigi Pirandello was an Italian nationalist and supported Italian fascism in a moderate way.

Luigi Pirandello then gave his Nobel Prize medal to the Fascist government to be melted down as part of the 1935 Oro alla Patria campaign during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War.

Luigi Pirandello took their act throughout the major cities of Europe, and the Pirandellian repertoire became increasingly well known.

Luigi Pirandello was one of the contributors of the nationalist women's magazine, Lidel, and the Fascist daily Il Tevere.

Luigi 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.

Luigi Pirandello was the last Italian playwright to be chosen for the award until Dario Fo won on 9 October 1997.

Luigi Pirandello died alone in his home at Via Bosio, Rome, on 10 December 1936.

Luigi Pirandello refused a State funeral offered by Mussolini and only in 1947 were his cremated remains buried in Sicily.

Luigi 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.

Luigi Pirandello's influence goes beyond playwrights; French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was inspired by Pirandello's ideas to explore one of the main pillars of his philosophy: existentialism.

Luigi Pirandello's legacy pushes further reflection into the complexities of characters, human consciousness, and identity.

Luigi Pirandello's poetry was translated for the first time in 2016 by George Hochfield.