Henrik Ibsen was born in Skien March 20, 1828. His father was a merchant whose business gradually became so bad that the family moved out of the town for economic reasons, to a farm called Venstøp. In January 1844 Henrik Ibsen moved to Grimstad to start as a chemist's apprentice. In October 1846 one of the chemist's maids gave birth to a son who was named Hans Jacob Henriksen – Henrik Ibsen was the father.

Besides working and hanging out with friends Ibsen found time to write while at the same time reading for his examen artium. He was inspired by the Latin curriculum and wrote the tragedy Catilina, one of his two dramas that are set in antiquity, during the winter and spring of 1849, (the other one being Emperor and Galilean). He published Catilina in 1850 under the pen name Brynjolf Bjarme. He had also used this name when he published his first poem ("In the Autumn", 1849).

In 1850 Ibsen left for Christiania to become a student at the University, and this brought him in contact with other young men with an interest in society and literature. He edited a periodical with Aasmund Vinje. This was hardly a profitable endeavour: In the foreword to the revised edition of Catilina in 1875 he and his friend Ole Schulerud (who had financed the first edition) reveal that once when they were in dire straits they sold the remaining copies for scrap paper. In 1850 Ibsen's play The Warrior's Barrow was accepted and staged at Christiania Theater. And then in 1851 violinist Ole Bull offered him the position of stage instructor at Det norske Theater in Bergen. While in Bergen Ibsen staged a new play from his pen every year from 1853 to 1857.

In 1857 Ibsen was engaged to Suzannah Thoresen, and in August of that year he was hired as artistic director at Christiania Norske Theater. Henrik Ibsen and Suzannah Thoresen married in 1858, and in 1859 their son Sigurd was born. In 1864 Ibsen and his family moved to Italy. He had been awarded a stipend from the Norwegian government, and from 1866 he received a yearly grant for life. In 1866 Brand was published in Copenhagen. The book was a success and brought Ibsen fame throughout Scandinavia.

Peer Gynt was published in 1867. The first printing sold out, and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson wrote a jubilant review. But not everyone liked the play – one of its critics was H. C. Andersen and another was Camilla Collett (commenting on the play in letters to Mrs Laura Kieler). However that was, Ibsen had now become an established dramatist. When the King of united Sweden and Norway had to pick representatives to attend the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, Ibsen was selected. In 1874 Edvard Grieg agreed to a request from Henrik Ibsen for him to write the music for Peer Gynt. The score was ready in 1875 and was used for the premiere at Christiania Theater in 1876.

Emperor and Galilean, published in 1873, was considered by Ibsen his most important drama, but it was the play that came 6 years later, A Doll's House, that came to be performed the most often. This play had a female protagonist that Camilla Collett found more acceptable. But others found this drama hard to digest, especially the ending. When the piece was to be staged in Germany in 1880, the actress who played Nora, Hedwig Niemann-Raabe, refused to play the ending as it was originally written. Ibsen felt that the lesser of two evils would be for him to write an alternative ending, rather than allowing it to be botched by someone else. So he dispatched an alternative ending in which Nora does not leave.

Ibsen's next play, Ghosts (1881), met with an even stronger reaction than A Doll's House. The following play, An Enemy of the People, can be seen as a way of dealing with the reactions to Ghosts.

Ibsen's dramas from The Pillars of Society (1877) to An Enemy of the People (1882) are often described as his social plays, even though he had not necessarily intended A Doll's House to be a drama about marital problems. Ibsen used external, seemingly societal problems in order to focus on the ethical choices of the individual. But starting with The Wild Duck (1884) the remaining of Ibsen's dramas are classified as the symbolic works. They were not always easy for the public to understand, and earned him the nickname "the Sphinx".

In 1891 Henrik and Suzannah Ibsen moved back to Kristiania. They would remain there till their deaths, Henrik Ibsen in 1906 and Suzannah Ibsen in 1914. From 1895 they lived in an apartment at Arbiensgate where the Ibsen Museum is now located.