It's the birthday of playwright Henrik Ibsen, born in Skien, Norway (1828). He is generally considered to be the father of modern drama. His father was a wealthy merchant in Norway's timber trade, but when Ibsen was eight years old his father went bankrupt, and the family had to move to a rundown farm outside of town. Their family friends stopped talking to them, Isben's father became abusive, and his mother fell into depression. When he was sixteen, Ibsen left home and never saw his family again.

He got a job as assistant stage manager for a new theater and then applied to the government for a stipend to travel abroad, and got it. He spent the next twenty-seven years living in Italy and Germany.

He found that by leaving his homeland he could finally see Norway clearly, and he began to work on creating a true Norwegian drama. At a time when most people were writing plays full of sword fights and murders, Ibsen started to write plays about relationships between ordinary people.

One of Isben's first realistic plays was A Doll's House (1879), about a woman named Nora who refuses to obey her husband and eventually leaves him, walking out of the house and slamming the door in the final scene. It changed the style of acting. At the time, most actors were praised for their ability to deliver long poetic speeches, but Ibsen emphasized small gestures, the inflection of certain words and pauses, and he inspired a new generation of actors to begin embodying the characters they played.

When he published his play Ghosts (1881), about a man with venereal disease, it was so scandalous that no one would produce it onstage for two years. A London newspaper called it, "An open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly." But eventually, after writers like George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde began calling him the greatest living playwright, audiences began to accept his work as literature.

Henrik Ibsen said, "Writing has ... been to me like a bath from which I have risen feeling cleaner, healthier, and freer."

- from Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac" on National Public Radio (NPR)