In 1920 he achieved critical success with As Before, Better than Before. Inspired, Pirandello wrote nine plays in one year, including his first three plays, Better Think Twice About It!, Liola, and It is So!, If You Think So, which were all each written in less than a week. In 1916 he first focused his attention on the theater and quickly became enthralled by the possibilities it presented. Within the next ten years, up until the First World War, he published two other novels and numerous short stories. Pirandello?s first widely acclaimed novel, The Late Mattia Pascal, was written in 1904. It was only in 1919, with the financial success of his plays, that he was able to sent Antonietta to a private sanitarium. His wife?s illness had a profound effect on Pirandello's writing as well, leading him to impose madness, illusion, and isolation in many of his plays. Their daughter was so disturbed by her mother's illness that she tried to commit suicide, but failed when the old revolver she used failed to fire. Pirandello instead kept her at home for seventeen years during which she insanely terrorized him and his three children. At that point Antonietta suffered a mental breakdown and became so violent that she should have been institutionalized. The young couple were fine until after the birth of their third child, coupled with the loss of the family fortune in a flood.

The girl's mother had died in childbirth due to her father, whose insane jealousy would not allow a doctor to be present during the birth. The marriage, arranged by his parents according to custom for him, linked him to Antonietta Portulano, the daughter of his father's business partner. In 1894, at the age of 27, he married a young woman whom he had never met. The sense of tragedy and disillusionment so prevalent in his works is primarily the result of a personal experience. The Outcast in 1893 was his first novel and contained the roots of things that would appear in his later writing.

After meeting up with the Sicilian novelist Capuana, Pirandello focused his attention on naturalistic fiction. Pirandello initially translated Goethe's Roman elegies as his first creative effort. He entered the University of Rome in 1887, later transferring to Bonn University where he completed a doctoral thesis on his native Sicilian dialect. His father was a sulfur dealer and expected his son to take up his trade, but Luigi excelled in his academics and was allowed to pursue a literary schooling. Luigi Pirandello was born in 1867 in Girgenti, now Agrigento, on the island of Sicily.

Author pirandello