Luigi Pirandello

Pirandello grew up wealthy on his family's Sicilian sulfur mines, until a catastrophic flood wiped out the family fortune and his wife's dowry investment in it alike, plunging him into decades of financial strain and forcing him to write for money. The same disaster helped trigger his wife Antonietta's severe and lasting mental illness, which shadowed his marriage and his lifelong preoccupation with fractured, unstable identity.

The Late Mattia Pascal (1904) was his first full statement of that obsession; his plays, especially Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), caused riots at their premieres and made him internationally famous as a dramatist as much as a novelist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934, and publicly aligned himself with Mussolini's fascist regime, at one point donating his Nobel medal to be melted down for the war effort.

He died in Rome in 1936, having requested no funeral ceremony at all.