'Six Characters in search of an Author' is a is a satirical tragicomedy play. First performed in 1921 at the Teatro Valle in Rome, it had a very mixed reception, with the audience shouting "Manicomio " ("Madhouse "). However, the reception improved significantly and in 1922 it played on Broadway at the Princess Theatre.The play starts with a group of actors preparing to rehearse for a Pirandello play. The rehearsal is interrupted by the arrival of six characters. One of then informs the manager that they are looking for an author. He explains that the author who created them did not finish their story, and that they therefore are unrealized characters who have not been fully brought to life. Initially, the manager goes to throw them out of the theatre, but becomes more intrigued when they start to describe their story.

"Pascal, a landowner fallen on hard times and trapped in a miserable marriage, runs away from home and wins a lot of money at the gaming tables in Monte Carlo. Meanwhile a body has been found in the millrace of his village and it is assumed that Pascal has killed himself. Seizing what looks like a chance to create a new life, he travels to Rome under an assumed name and struggles to invent a different identity which he can inhabit. He fails, returns home, finds his wife has remarried and has to act out the role of being as it were a living ghost. All these tragic events are recounted with verve and wit and comes across clearly in Simborowski's spirited translation from the Italian."Robert Nye in The Guardian

A young wife in a nineteenth-century Sicilian village, Marta is deeply in love with her husband Rocco and pregnant with his child. But when Rocco discovers a letter written to Marta by a would-be suitor, he falsely accuses her of infidelity and banishes her from their home. Soon the whole village turns against the supposed adulteress, setting in motion a series of tragic events that culminates in the loss of Marta’s family home and business, as well as the deaths of her father and newborn child. Plunged into poverty and treated as a social leper, with practically nothing else to lose, Marta is determined to claw her way back into a society bent on excluding her.    The Outcast is an early masterwork from Nobel Prize–winning Italian author Luigi Pirandello that combines elements of Zolaesque naturalism with emerging modernist aesthetics. This fresh English translation, the first in nearly one hundred years, showcases Pirandello’s deft play with language and his use of irony.  

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Luigi Pirandello's masterpiece, "Six Characters in Search of an Author", presents the playwright's views about the isolation of the individual from society and from himself. This play within a play chronicles six characters as they seek an author to tell their story, and to present their real lives on stage. But do their realities make better tales than fiction?