Eugène Ionesco: References & Edit History

• French literature

  / Theatrical experiments
• Ionic dialect
• Romanian literature

  / Between the wars
• Romania

  / The arts
• Theatre of the Absurd
• comedy

  / The absurd

• The Bald Soprano
• The Lesson
• Rhinoceros

There has been some discrepancy regarding the date of birth of Eugène Ionesco. Several standard reliable sources give his year of birth as 1912, while others assert it was 1909.

The March 29, 1994, New York Times, one source that claims the year of birth to have been 1909, offered a possible explanation for the disputed dates, saying, “…born in Slatina, Romania, on Nov. 26, 1909, although he took three years off his age and claimed 1912 as his birth year, presumably because he wanted to have made his name before the age of 40.”

Nancy Lane offers additional explanation in her book, Understanding Eugène Ionesco (1994). The first chapter of the book includes a note that discusses Ionesco’s date of birth:

“Until 1990, 1912 was the published, universally accepted birth date. This erroneous date was invented—either by Ionesco himself (according to [Emmanuel] Jacquart) or by Jacques Lemarchand (according to [Marie-Claude] Hubert)—at the time of the premiere of The Bald Soprano (1950) in order to make Ionesco a ‘young’ playwright (that is, under forty years old). (Marie-Claude Hubert gives the correct birth date in her book on Ionesco [Eugène Ionesco, 1990] but fails to change the dates for other events in Ionesco’s life, which leads to some anomalies and contradictions in the biographical information in her otherwise excellent book.)”

Emmanuel Jacquart published a chronology on Ionesco within the Pléiade version of Ionesco’s works.