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Eugène Ionesco, 1959. (credit: Mark Gerson)

(born Nov. 26, 1909, Slatina, Rom. — died March 28, 1994, Paris, France) Romanian-born French playwright. He studied in Bucharest and Paris, where he lived from 1945. His first one-act "antiplay," The Bald Soprano (1950), inspired a revolution in dramatic techniques and helped inaugurate the Theatre of the Absurd. He followed it with other one-act plays in which illogical events create an atmosphere both comic and grotesque, including The Lesson (1951), The Chairs (1952), and The New Tenant (1955). His most popular full-length play, Rhinoceros (1959), concerns a provincial French town in which all the citizens are metamorphosing into rhinoceroses. Other plays include Exit the King (1962) and A Stroll in the Air (1963). He was elected to the Académie Française in 1970.

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