Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Ibsen was born in 1828 in the small town of Skien in southern Norway. His father, once a wealthy merchant, went bankrupt when Henrik was eight, and the family fell on hard times. At fifteen he left home to be apprenticed to an apothecary in the small town of Grimstad, studying at night for the university entrance examination and beginning to write poems and plays. Later he worked as playwright and stage manager at the theatre in Bergen, and then ran a theatre in Christiania, now Oslo, but the theatre went bankrupt and his plays met with repeated indifference. At thirty-six, bitterly disappointed with his country, he went abroad with his family and lived for twenty-seven years in Italy and Germany, where he wrote one play after another that shook Europe: Peer Gynt, A Doll's House, An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck. At sixty-three he returned to Norway and was honoured as a national hero. He is called 'the father of modern drama'.