Nobel Prize Recipient. Luigi Pirandello, an Italian author, received world-wide recognition after being awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature, and according to the Nobel Prize committee, "for his bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art." His writings dealt with the themes of illusion and reality, and the tragicomic absurdity of life. Surprisingly. he received only one nomination for the Nobel candidacy. The nominator was Guglielmo Marconi, the president of Arts Class at the Royal Academy of Italy and the 1909 Nobel Prize recipient. He wrote nearly 10 novels, hundreds of short stories, and over 50 plays, some of which are written in his native Sicilian while others in German. Born into an upper-class family, his family openly supported the unification of Italy. His father fought under Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi all the way to the end at the Battle of Aspromonte. While being home schooled, Pirandello listened to the fables told by the elderly. After writing his first tragedy at age twelve, his father responded by enrolling him in a technical school. His father's plans for him were to follow in the family business of mining, but Pirandello had no interest. He eventually switched his major to humanities, studying 19th century Italian poets. He finished high school in Palermo, the capital of Sicily, and then enrolled in the University of Palermo to study law but in 1887, he entered the University of Rome. After a disagreement with the professor of classics, he went in 1888 to the University of Bonn, Germany, where in 1891 he earned his doctorate in Romance Philosophy with his thesis "The Dialect of Agrigento." Although he was in love with a cousin, his family had arranged a marriage in 1894 with his father's business associate's daughter. His bride was pretty, shy, and withdrawn. The marriage did give him monetary independence, thus he moved to Rome and started to write. By then he had published "My Giocondo" in 1889, "Easter de Gea" in 1891 and later "Elegie Romane" in 1896. He began to contribute his short stories to periodicals, at first without any payment. In 1897 as a husband and father of three young sons, he accepted a position to teach Italian at the Istituto Superiore di Magistero di Roma. In the meantime, the magazine "Marzocco" had published several more pages of the "Dialoghi." By 1898 he had co-founded a successful weekly periodical in which he published plays and novella. In 1903 his father lost a fortune when his mines were flooded and there was a landslide, and his wife's family also lost money; this impacted his family's income. His wife became upset about the situation to the point that she had a mental collapse, and was not able to care for their children. He thought of suicide, but rallied thinking of his wife and children. He asked for monetary compensation from all the periodicals in which he was publishing stories free. He began to write novels and some were published in Germany. He did this while caring for his wife as she was hallucinating with rages of jealousy concerning him. His role changed from a loving husband to care giver. His literary attitudes were expressed in "Humor," a 1908 essay, and these attitudes were fundamental to all of Pirandello's plays. During World War II, one of his sons volunteered for military service and was captured by the army of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, but came home at the end of the war. Never being close to his father, he wrote in 1915 after his mother's death the emotional the novella "Talk with the Characters." After attempting to manage his wife's mental illness for twenty years, in 1919 his wife was admitted to a mental asylum in Rome, and she never came home, dying there forty years later. They remained husband and wife until his death. In 1920 he attempted to write comedies but the public did not receive these well. In six weeks of 1921, he wrote his two most successful plays, "Six Characters in Search of an Author" and "Henry IV," which were performed on stages around the world. In 1925 he wrote to the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini asking for membership in the National Fascist Party, describing himself as "a Fascist because I am Italian." By 1927 he had fell out of favor with the fascist government. For the rest of his life, he was placed on a watchlist of the secret fascist police as a "person of interest." His last novel. "One, No One and One Hundred Thousand" was published in a magazine in series between 1925 and 1926, This is thought to have been one of his best novels along with the 1913 novel "The Old and The Young." He embarked on a career as a producer and in 1925 founded his Art Theatre in Rome. His greatest achievement was his large number of dramas, which were published, between 1918 and 1935, under the collective title of "Naked Masks." In his later years, he traveled, thus being away from home at long periods. His plays were being performed on Broadway stages and Hollywood was adapting his books and plays for films. Besides the Nobel Prize, he received the Legion of Honor in 1925 from the French. At his request, there was to be no funeral, but the Fascist Party gave the Italian Nobel Prize recipient a state funeral.