Eugène Ionesco was born in Romania in 1909. Though he was raised primarily in Paris as a child, he spent much of his young adulthood in Romania, where he studied French literature at the University of Bucharest. He published his first essay in 1930 and a volume of poetry in 1934. He moved to Paris again on a fellowship in 1940, but relocated to Marseilles following the German invasion of France.
In 1948, while learning English for the first time, Ionesco began to see the oddness of language use, and wrote his first play about the subject, The Bald Soprano. The play was first produced in 1950 and rapidly gained acclaim; Ionesco followed it in the next five years with The Lesson, The...
