Eugene Ionesco

Ionesco was born in Romania, though he spent most of his childhood in France. As a child, Ionesco had an out of body experience of sorts in which he felt as though he was floating and illuminated—and, after returning to the ground, he felt that the world looked corrupt, decayed, and meaningless. This experience influenced many of his later works, including Rhinoceros. He returned to Romania as a teenager following his parents’ divorce and studied French literature at the University of Bucharest. Ionesco married in 1936, had a daughter, and returned to Paris to study in 1938. When World War II broke out in 1939, Ionesco briefly tried to return to Romania but ended up waiting out the war in Marseilles, France, before returning to Paris soon after the war ended. Throughout his career, Ionesco wrote criticism, poetry, one novel, and theoretical works. He wrote primarily in French.