The popular plays of the Franco-Romanian author Eugène Ionesco (1912-1994) protested the dehumanizing effects of modern civilization and depicted the despair of the individual who vainly seeks meaning for his or her existence. He has been called the founder of the Theater of the Absurd.

Eugène lonesco was born on November 26, 1912, in Slatina, Romania, to a French mother and a Romanian father. The following year the family moved to Paris, but soon after he was 12, they returned to Romania. He completed all of his secondary education there and specialized in French at the University of Bucharest. From 1936 to 1938 he taught French in a secondary school in Bucharest. Two years after his marriage in 1936 to Rodica Burileano, he received a grant from the French government to study in France and write a thesis on Sin and Death in French Poetry Since Baudelaire . During the war...