Six Characters in Search of an Author

Luigi Pirandello

Heinemann, 1980 - Drama - 70 pages

Presented here for the first time together, and many for the first time in English, are the writings that formed the genesis of "Six Characters in Search of an Author," along with a new translation of the theater masterpiece itself by Martha Witt and Mary Ann Frese Witt. Although Pirandello's best-known play is now considered a revolutionary modernist work, it did not begin as avant-garde art, but rather in the musings of a relatively unknown Sicilian living in Rome. The writings included in this volume display its genesis. The idea of characters as living beings in dialogue with their author first appears as a major theme in a short story titled "Characters," published in 1906. Pirandello did not include it in any of his collections of short stories, and it has not previously been translated into English. The interaction between characters demanding to "live" in writing and an author who rejects them would be developed in Pirandello's 1911 story "The Tragedy of a Character." In 1925, Pirandello conceived the idea of writing a novel about an author who rejects the characters who come to him begging to be put into a novel, and in a July 1917 letter to his son, he gives the novel a title: "Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore: Romanzo da fare" ("Six Characters in Search of an Author: A Novel to Be Made"). In this volume Martha Witt and Mary Ann Frese Witt provide all these materials for a complete appreciation of this masterwork. "Wonderfully fresh and readable, consistent as well as fluid, sensitive to the flows of the original language and yet smooth and precise, this new translation succeeds in bringing Pirandello's masterpiece to life once again. The introduction brilliantly captures the playwright's sense of humanity's unshakeable decency and moral dilemmas; the addition of a previously untranslated short story, "Characters," enlightens the play. English-speaking readers can now appreciate to the fullest the creative energy of a twentieth-century literary genius." - Valeria Finucci, Professor of Italian & Theater Studies, Duke University A new English translation. Introduction, notes, bibliography.

About the author

Born in Sicily, Pirandello attended the universities of Palermo, Rome, and Bonn. He obtained his doctorate in philology with a thesis on the dialect of his native town, Agrigento before settling in Rome to teach and write. In 1894, he married a Sicilian girl, Antonietta Portulano, who bore him three children before she went mad and afterwards provided the inspiration for many of his stories and plays. In all, Pirandello wrote 6 novels, some 250 short stories, and about 50 plays. It was a novel, Il fu Mattia Pascal (1904), that first brought him fame. Only in 1920, when he was past 50, did he turn seriously to playwriting. His first stage success had been a comedy, Liola (1917), written in the Agrigento dialect. It took its theme, if not its mood, from the Mandragola of Machiavelli (see Vols. 3 and 4). In 1921, Pirandello presented his most famous play Six Characters in Search of an Author. Here he seeks to confuse his spectators, who are forced into a paradox of reality and illusion when six "characters" search out the actors of a theatrical troupe to play out their inexorable story. The play exemplifies the Pirandellian conflict between art, which is unchanging and constant, and life, which is a continuous succession of mutations. Pirandello deliberately destroyed the traditional boundaries between audience and spectacle, reflecting the relativity and subjectivity of human existence. The play's unconventional format, which resulted in a riot, established Pirandello as Europe's leading avant-garde dramatist. The main body of Pirandello's plays falls into three overlapping categories, the first exploring the nature of the theater, the second the complexities of personality in the etymological or dramatic sense of the term, and the third rising to dramatic representation of the categorical imperatives of social, religious, and artistic community. Besides the world-famous Six Characters in Search of an Author (1918), his best plays in the three categories include Each in His Own Way (1924), It Is So (If You Think So) (1917), Henry IV (1922), The New Colony (1925), Lazarus, As You Desire Me (1930), and The Mountain Giants (1937), written after he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in 1934 and left incomplete. Pirandello is the forerunner of much modern theater and literature; among the figures who owe their roots to the innovations of Pirandello are Bertolt Brecht, Jean Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Samuel Beckett (see Vol. 1).

Bibliographic information

• Title: Six Characters in Search of an Author; Heinemann plays
• Author: Luigi Pirandello
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Heinemann, 1980
• ISBN: 0435209647, 9780435209643
• Length: 70 pages
• Subjects: Drama / European / General