"In 1918, when he was fifty and working on [his classic play] Six Characters in Search of an Author, Luigi Pirandello found himself both a prisoner and an outcast in life. Like an obsessive presence, only his characters peopled his solitude; splinters of a broken dream that had sprung back fully armed to threaten and cajole him. Shut in his study he conversed with them. waving his arms wildly, flashing his eyes and making the strangest faces in the world."

[Pirandello won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1934.]