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    A Study Guide for Luigi Pirandello's "Six Characters in Search of an Author"
    A Study Guide for Luigi Pirandello's "Six Characters in Search of an Author"
    A Study Guide for Luigi Pirandello's "Six Characters in Search of an Author"
    Ebook47 pages32 minutes

    A Study Guide for Luigi Pirandello's "Six Characters in Search of an Author"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Luigi Pirandello's "Six Characters in Search of an Author," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535833264
    A Study Guide for Luigi Pirandello's "Six Characters in Search of an Author"

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      A Study Guide for Luigi Pirandello's "Six Characters in Search of an Author" - Gale

      4

      Six Characters in Search of an Author

      Luigi Pirandello

      1921

      Introduction

      Six Characters in Search of an Author created Luigi Pirandello’s international reputation in the 1920s and is still the play by which he is most widely identified.

      With originality that was startling to his contemporaries, Pirandello introduced a striking and compelling dramatic situation that initially baffled but eventually dazzled audiences and critics alike. In what begins as a realistic play he introduces six figures who make the extraordinary claim that they are the incomplete but independent products of an artist’s imagination—characters the artist abandoned when he couldn’t complete their story. These characters have arrived on the stage to find an author themselves, someone who will give them the fullness of literary life that their original author has denied them. Furthermore, these characters claim that they are more real than the actors who eventually want to portray them.

      This concept was so startling it helped to incite a riot in the audience when the original production of the play was staged in Rome on May 10, 1921. Later that year, however, audiences and critics had assimilated the extraordinary idea and were enchanted by a remounted production in Milan. The play would then see successful productions in London and New York in February and October of 1922, in Paris in 1923, and in Berlin and Vienna in 1924. Pirandello’s own theatre company, founded in 1925, then performed the play in Italian throughout the major cities of Europe and North and South America. As a result of this assault on the theatre world, Pirandello became one of the most respected and influential dramatists in the world by the end of the 1920s, and today Six Characters in Search of an Author is considered one of the most influential plays in the history of world literature.

      Author Biography

      Luigi Pirandello was born in Sicily (the large island near the toe of Italy) on June 28, 1867, to a wealthy father who owned sulphur mines. Though his father wanted him to pursue a business career, Pirandello preferred academics and by 1891 had earned a Ph.D. in linguistics, eventually spending many years of his life as a professor of Italian literature and language at a school for women in Rome.

      In 1894 Pirandello’ s father arranged for his son to marry the daughter of his business partner, and Pirandello’s resulting financial independence enabled him to live in Rome and pursue a writing career. Although he initially focused on poetry and short stories, Pirandello first achieved success as a writer in 1904 with the novel The Late Mattia Pascal. However, in 1903 floods in his father’s sulphur mines had brought financial ruin to the Pirandellos and altered the playwright’s life irrevocably. Pirandello’s wife reacted to the catastrophe with an emotional breakdown from which she never recovered, spending the rest of her life in a condition of mental instability. His wife’s condition made Pirandello’s life miserable but also supplied

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