Henrik Ibsen

Born Henrik Johan Ibsen on March 20, 1828, in Skien, a small lumber town in southeastern Norway, the eldest son of Knud Ibsen, a prosperous merchant, and Marichen Altenburg. In 1836, when Henrik was eight, his father went bankrupt, and the family plunged into poverty and social humiliation, an experience that left Ibsen with a lifelong sensitivity to respectability's fragility. At fifteen he was sent to Grimstad as an apothecary's apprentice, where he studied at night for university entrance and fathered an illegitimate son with a servant girl, a scandal he suppressed for decades. In 1851 he was hired as playwright-in-residence and stage director at the Norwegian Theatre in Bergen, where over six years he was involved in the production of more than 145 plays. He married Suzannah Thoresen in 1858; their only child, Sigurd, was born the following year. Frustrated by Norway's cultural provincialism and embittered by the country's refusal to support Denmark in the Second Schleswig War, he left in 1864 and spent the next twenty-seven years in self-imposed exile in Italy and Germany. It was abroad that he wrote the works that revolutionized European theater: the verse dramas Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867), and then the prose plays that earned him the title "father of modern drama", A Doll's House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), Hedda Gabler (1890), and The Master Builder (1892). He returned to Norway in 1891 as a literary hero. His last play, When We Dead Awaken (1899), is an artist's confession of failure. He suffered a series of strokes beginning in 1900 and died in Kristiania, now Oslo, on May 23, 1906.