SOURCE: "Art for Life's Sake," in Pirandello's Theater: The Recovery of the Modern Stage for Dramatic Art, Southern Illinois University Press, 1974, pp. 7-21.

Below, Paolucci discusses the defining characteristics of Pirandello's drama, emphasizing the dramatist's concern with depicting the nature of personality and consciousness.

The theatre as Pirandello represents it in Sir Characters in Search of an Author is very much like life itself, always at odds with itself, always getting in its own way, yet always pursuing and, in the end, having its way.

—Lionel Trilling, in his The Experience of Literature, 1967.

Pirandello came to the theater late in life, when he was close to fifty, and long established as a poet, short-story writer, and novelist of considerable fame. He was born on June 28, 1867 in Girgenti, Sicily (since renamed Agrigento to recall its original Greek name). The chronology of his pre-dramatic writings begins with a collection of...