Henrik Ibsen   (1828–1906) A Doll's House LINKS The Doll House—The World of Ibsen http://members.visi.net/~jhlind/ With many lists of reviews, productions, and links, this playful site on Ibsen is maintained by Jefferson Lindquist, a theater director and teacher from Chesapeake, Virginia. BIOGRAPHY Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) Ibsen was born in Skien, Norway (a seaport about a hundred miles south of Oslo), the son of a wealthy merchant. When Ibsen was eight, his father's business failed, and at fifteen he was apprenticed to an apothecary in the tiny town of Grimstad. He hated this profession. To solace himself, he read poetry and theology and began to write. When he was twenty-two, he became a student in Christiania and published his first play. In 1851, his diligent, though unremarkable, writing earned him an appointment as "theater-poet" to a new theater in Bergen, where he remained until 1857, learning both the business and the art of drama. He wrote several plays based on Scandinavian folklore, held positions at two theaters in Christiania, and married. When he was thirty-six, he applied to the government for a poet's pension—a stipend that would have permitted him to devote himself to writing. The stipend was refused. Enraged, he left Norway, and, though he was granted the stipend two years later, spent the next twenty- seven years in Italy and Germany, where he wrote the realistic social dramas that established his reputation as the founder of modern theater. Such plays as Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), and A Doll's House (1878) inevitably generated controversy as Ibsen explored venereal disease, the stupidity and greed of the "compact majority," and the position of women in society. In 1891, he returned to live in Christiania, where he was recognized and honored as one of Norway's (and Europe's) finest writers.