Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) was a Norwegian playwright born in Skien. After years as a struggling theater director in Bergen and Christiania he left Norway in 1864 and spent twenty-seven years in Italy and Germany, where he wrote nearly all the plays that made him the founder of modern drama: Brand and Peer Gynt in verse, then the prose plays A Doll's House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck and Hedda Gabler, which put marriage, hypocrisy and inheritance on stage with a frankness that caused scandals across Europe. He returned to Norway in 1891 and died in Christiania after a series of strokes.