Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Johan Ibsen was born 20 March 1828 into Skien's merchant elite, with deep roots in Telemark's old powerful families. He directed theaters in Norway through the 1850s, then broke through internationally in the 1860s with Brand and Peer Gynt - the latter a surreal verse epic he'd never match in form again. In 1864 he left for Italy and Germany, where he stayed 27 years, moving between Rome, Dresden, and Munich, writing almost exclusively in realistic prose. A Doll's House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler - each one peeled back the façade of bourgeois respectability, often drawing on his own family and the textures of Skien, and each one scandalized audiences who expected theater to preach propriety, not dissect it. He returned to Christiania in 1891, by then a figure Freud ranked with Shakespeare and Sophocles. He died 23 May 1906, having fathered a prime minister and left a body of work that made him, in 2014, still the second-most-performed dramatist in the world.