original text:'Deprive the average man of his vital lie, and you've robbed him of happiness as well'about the quoted person:Norwegian playwright. Ibsen is generally acknowledged as the founder of modern prose drama. He moved away from the Romantic style, unmasking the romantic hero, and brought the problems and ideas of the day onto his stage. he wrote many plays, including Lady Inger of Ostrat (1855), The Vikings of Helgoland (1858), The Pretenders (1864) and peer gynt (1867). Ibsen himself considered The Emperor and the Galilean (1873) his most important play. In An Enemy of the People (1882) Ibsen attacked "the compact liberal majority" and the conformity of mass opinion. Ibsen died in Christiania on May 23, 1906. The last years of his life were clouded by mental illness.

In his plays Ibsen focused on character rather situations and created realistic dramas of psychological conflict. His central theme was the duty of the individual towards himself. In the task of self-realization his characters faced the out-of-date conventions of bourgeois society. Ibsen's anarchistic individualism made a deep impression on the younger generation outside Norway, where he was considered a progressive writer. In his home country, however, Ibsen was seen as a moral preacher.