Luigi Pirandello

Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) was born in Agrigento, Sicily, the son of a rich mining contractor. Having studied at the universities of Palermo and Rome and taken a degree in philology at Bonn, the young Pirandello turned to writing poetry and stories, achieving his first literary success in 1904 with his novel The Late Mattia Pascal. During World War I, Pirandello began to write for the stage, winning an international following with plays such as Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) and Henry IV(1922). In 1934, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Pirandello was the author of novels, essays, stories, and more than fifty plays, as well as an influence on writers as different as Eugène Ionesco and T.S. Eliot.

The Late Mattia Pascal By Luigi Pirandello Introduction by Charles Simic Translated by William Weaver Nobel Prize–winner Luigi Pirandello is at once the most teasing and profound of modern masters, a connoisseur of ironies and impossibilities, and The Late Mattia Pascal is undoubtedly his most polished performance as a writer of fiction. Category: Fiction Publisher: NYRB Classics