In Search of an Author: Pirandello and the Poetics of Biography

This article examines the major biographies of the Italian modernist writer Luigi Pirandello and documents their striking practice of interpreting Pirandello's fictional texts through the prism of autobiography. It argues that the non-literary or paraliterary status traditionally accorded to biography as a form has prevented an examination of the implications for criticism of the role of biography, and therefore this habitual slippage between biography and fiction has been neglected. The article analyses the overlap between biography, fiction, and criticism which characterizes much writing on Pirandello and suggests a critical approach which might take these slippages into account, as well as contribute, in a broader context, to the critical reassessment of biography as a form.