August Strindberg

August Strindberg (Stockholm, 1849 – Stockholm, 1912) was a Swedish playwright and novelist, widely regarded as the father of modern Swedish literature and one of the main figures in the renewal of European theatre at the end of the nineteenth century. He wrote in Swedish, moved easily in French, and worked in almost every genre, including poetry, essays and painting. His career bridged naturalism and expressionism, and his influence reaches well beyond Scandinavia.

He was the son of a merchant and of a former maid who had been his father's lover before they married. His childhood, shaped by a severe father and a mother of intense piety, left him feeling out of place at the elite school he attended. He later turned these memories into fiction, most explicitly in the autobiographical stories The Son of a Servant. When his father's business failed, he combined his studies at Uppsala with work as a teacher, tutor and bit-part actor, but finished none of his degrees.

His first major play, Master Olof, was turned down by the Royal Theatre in 1872 and was not staged until 1881, at the New Theatre, which finally brought him success. In the meantime he worked as a journalist and as an assistant librarian at the Royal Library in Stockholm, a post he found stifling. He met Siri von Essen in 1875 and married her in 1877. The novel The Red Room (1879) established his reputation and is often described as the first modern Swedish novel.

The 1880s brought controversy and exile. After attacking a respected historian and the political establishment, he left Sweden in 1883 with Siri. Married (1884), a harsh attack on bourgeois marriage, led to a legal case that he won, though the ordeal fed a paranoia that stayed with him for life. In 1887 he wrote The Father, and in 1888 Miss Julie, naturalist dramas in which character, shaped by heredity and environment, matters more than plot. He set out his theory of theatre in the preface to the latter.

Between 1894 and 1896 he went through a severe breakdown, which he called his "Inferno crisis". Failed marriages, poverty, heavy drinking and episodes of imagined persecution led to hospitalization. The autobiographical novel Inferno grew out of this period. After recovering, he turned to the occult and to the ideas of Swedenborg, and returned to playwriting with To Damascus (1898), a spiritual pilgrimage, and A Dream Play (1902), in which time and space dissolve and characters split and merge. Both became important precursors of expressionism and surrealism.

In his last years, back in Stockholm and married to Harriet Bosse, he was extraordinarily productive, writing plays, novels, essays and journalism, and helping to run the Intimate Theatre, which staged his chamber pieces. He died of cancer in 1912. His legacy lies in his reform of Swedish drama, his influence on expressionist and absurdist theatre, and his standing in Sweden as a central figure of its literature.