Her Husband

by Luigi Pirandello

  Like many of Italy’s greatest modern writers, Luigi Pirandello was a Sicilian. He was born in a community called “Caos,” near Agrigento, where his father owned sulphur mines, in 1867. He studied in Rome and in Bonn. Germany, then married and settled in Rome. His wife’s lifelong mental illness had a deep effect on his writing. He began his career as a poet, novelist, and short story writer, also publishing an important essay, On Humor, in 1908. His best-known novel is The Late Mattia Pascal, 1904. His earliest plays, such as The Vise (1912) and Sicilian Limes (1913), were one-act adaptations of his stories. Pirandello became best known as a dramatist, rising to international fame with the production of Six Characters in Search of an Author in Paris in 1923. This was followed by the success of the play many consider his greatest, Henry IV. Other representative plays by Pirandello include Liolà, It is so! (If You Think So), and Each in His Own Way. These five plays were translated by Eric Bentley and published under the title Naked Masks in 1952. Maschere nude (Naked Masks) is the title given to the entire corpus of Pirandello’s plays in Italy. Pirandello received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934. He died in 1936.

  Mary Ann Frese Witt is Professor of French and Italian at North Carolina State University. She is the author of Existential Prisons: Confinement in Mid-Twentieth-Century French Literature (1985); The Humanities: Cultural Roots and Continuities (1980; rev. ed. 1985, 1989, 1993, 1997, 2001), and of the forthcoming Aesthetic Fascism and the Search for Modern Tragedy (2001).

  Martha King is the translator of Grazia Deledda, Reeds in the Wind (1998); Grazia Deledda, Cosima (1988) and Elias Portolu (1995). She is also the editor of New Italian Women: A Collection of Short Fiction (1989). A selection of stories by Anna Banti, with introduction, in collaboration with Carol Lazzaro-Weis, will be published in 2001 in the Modern Language Association translation series.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pirandello, Luigi, 1867-1936.

  [Suo marito. English]

  Her husband / by Luigi Pirandello ; translated from the Italian by Martha King and Mary Ann Frese Witt.

  ISBN 0-8223-2600-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

  I. King, Martha, 1928-II. Witt, Mary Ann Frese. III. Title.

  PQ4835.17 S7713 2000 853’.912–dc21 00-030868