Eugène Ionesco (1909-1994), Romanian-born French playwright, one of the chief exponents of the movement known as theater of the absurd. Born Eugen Ionescu in Slatina, Ionesco spent his childhood in Paris but returned to Romania at the age of 13. He taught French in Bucharest before returning to Paris in 1939 to write. His plays depict the ridiculous, futile existence of humans in an unpredictable universe, who, because of their innate limitations, cannot communicate with one another. This pessimistic philosophy became a tenet of the theater of the absurd, a movement in French and English theater that lamented the senselessness of the human condition. Although Ionesco's intent was serious, his plays are rich in humor. Avant-garde, chiefly one-act works, they employ stifling, meaningless language and illogical, isolating situations to emphasize human incapabilities.

La cantatrice chauve (1950; translated as The Bald Soprano, 1956) is a satire that exaggerates aspects of routine living to demonstrate the pointlessness of mediocrity. The characters, capable of speaking only in platitudes and non sequiturs, are unable to communicate with each other. Ionesco used the same chattering technique in La leçon (1951; The Lesson, 1958), in which a raving professor ultimately kills his young students. In Les chaises (1952; The Chairs, 1958) two old people chat with nonexistent guests. Amédée (1953; translated 1958) is about a couple whose deadness of mutual feeling produces a corpse that grows threateningly until it surrounds them. Le nouveau locataire (1956; The New Tenant, 1958) is centered around a character confined to the space of an armchair. In Rhinocéros (1959; translated 1960), perhaps his best-known work, the people of a small town are transformed into rhinoceroses. The main character, initially an average-man prototype, becomes isolated from the town's citizens as he struggles against their conformity. La soif et la faim (1966; Hunger and Thirst, 1969) portrays a man who, stifled by his stable marriage, unsuccessfully seeks fulfillment elsewhere.

Ionesco's other plays include Jeux de massacre (1970; The Killing Game, 1974) and L'homme aux valises (The Man with Bags, 1977). Many of his plays were staged in the United States. He also wrote commentary on the theater; memoirs, titled Present passe, passe present (1968; Present Past, Past Present, 1971), and the novel Le solitaire (1973; The Hermit, 1974). No longer writing plays in the 1980s and 1990s, he spent a great deal of time painting. Ionesco was elected to the French Academy in 1970.