Eugène Ionesco

Eugène Ionesco was born Eugen Ionescu in Slatina, Romania, in 1909 and brought up as an Orthodox Christian. He spent much of his childhood in France, where his mother had roots. As a young man, he moved back and forth between Romania and France, working on a doctoral degree and writing articles for Romanian publications. He settled permanently in France in the late 1930s, but it was not until a decade later that he had his major breakthrough with The Bald Soprano (first performed in 1950). He wrote several more one-act plays in the same absurdist vein throughout the 1950s, gaining a modest reputation. His reputation increased at the end of the decade with his foray into longer and more ambitious plays like The Killers (1958) and Rhinoceros (1959). Ionesco, along with playwrights like Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet, came to be championed as a pioneer of the so-called “Theatre of the Absurd,” in which traditional dramatic conventions were violently undermined in order to convey the randomness and absurdity of humanity’s existence in the contemporary world. Ionesco was elected to the Académie Française in 1970, and he remained engaged with the theater until his death in 1994.