Authors

Norwegian · 1828–1906

Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Ibsen is the father of modern drama — the playwright whose works transformed world theatre more completely than any other single figure. His sequence of social problem plays — A Doll's House (1879), Ghosts (1881), Hedda Gabler (1890), The Wild Duck (1884) — invented the template of psychological realism that all subsequent serious drama has worked within. Born in poverty in Skien, he spent twenty-seven years in voluntary exile in Germany and Italy, returning to Norway a famous man in 1891. His late symbolic plays — The Master Builder, When We Dead Awaken — anticipate expressionism.