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He briefly affiliated with the ruling Fascist Party during the 1920s, which got him a position at the helm of the Teatro d’Arte di Roma, but then publicly rejected the Fascists in 1927, and then seemed to waffle back and forth for the rest of his life. The public’s reaction to the controversial Six Characters in Search of an Author and the success of Pirandello’s Henry IV launched the author to international renown. Antoinetta’s mental illness, likely in part exacerbated by Pirandello’s numerous affairs, is a recurring influence on Pirandello’s work during this period in 1919, she went to a mental asylum that she would ultimately never leave. He published a number of important stories, novellas, and especially plays in the 1910s, including Right You Are (if you think so) and The Rules of the Game. During this period, however, Pirandello first tasted fame with the publication of his novel The Late Mattia Pascal and his essay L’Umorismo, published in English as On Humor. Pirandello began teaching more lessons to compensate, but the catastrophe’s most significant legacy was the mental collapse it precipitated in Pirandello’s wife Antoinetta, who never fully recovered and became increasingly violent and jealous over the following decade. In 1903, his and his wife’s families suffered a financial disaster when an important sulfur mine flooded.

He returned to Rome, where he taught Italian and began writing and publishing fiction, including a number of novellas and his first play. At his family’s behest, in 1894 he married Maria Antonietta Portulano, the daughter of another family of Agrigento sulfur merchants.

He definitively turned down the opportunity to join his father’s business a few years later, choosing instead to study Philology at the Universities of Palermo, Rome, and Bonn (Germany), where he finished his degree in 1891 with a dissertation on his hometown’s Sicilian dialect. After moving with his family to the Sicilian capital of Palermo at age 13, he turned to poetry.

Born to a wealthy and politically active merchant family near the Sicilian city of Girgenti (now called Agrigento), Luigi Pirandello quickly rejected the idea of following in his father’s footsteps and, inspired by the ghost stories told to him by one of the servants who worked in his house, began writing fiction at a young age.