Eugène Ionesco books in order

Eugène Ionesco (1909-1994) was a Romanian-French playwright, a founding figure of the Theatre of the Absurd, best known for The Bald Soprano (1950), The Chairs (1952) and Rhinoceros (1959). He was born Eugen Ionescu in Slatina, Romania, in November 1909 and died in Paris on 28 March 1994.

Writing mainly in French, Ionesco made his debut with La Cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano), which he called an anti-play; it opened at the Théâtre des Noctambules in Paris on 11 May 1950, directed by Nicolas Bataille, and has run continuously at the Théâtre de la Huchette since 1957. La Leçon (The Lesson) and Les Chaises (The Chairs) followed, dated 1951 and 1952 in Wikipedia's list of his plays. Rhinocéros, in which the people of a provincial town turn into rhinoceroses, premiered in Düsseldorf in November 1959 and is often read as a response to the rise of fascism and to mass conformity; it reached Paris in 1960 under Jean-Louis Barrault, London the same year at the Royal Court with Laurence Olivier, directed by Orson Welles, and Broadway in 1961, where Zero Mostel won a Tony Award. Le Roi se meurt (Exit the King) followed in 1962. Ionesco was elected to the Académie française on 22 January 1970, taking seat 6, and won the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (1970) and the Jerusalem Prize (1973).

For collectors

Ionesco's plays were published in French by Gallimard, which Wikidata records as the publisher of Rhinocéros, so Gallimard first editions are the core of a French-language collection. For the English translations, check the title page, publisher and date of any copy offered as a first English edition.