August Strindberg

Johan August Strindberg was born on 22 January 1849 in Stockholm, Sweden, the third surviving son of Carl Oscar Strindberg, a shipping agent, and Eleonora Ulrika Norling, a serving-maid. His Broadway credits include The Dream Play, The Father, Barbara's Wedding, The Bridal Crown, and Dance of Death, among other productions.

Strindberg's childhood, which he described in his autobiographical novel The Son of a Servant, was marked by emotional insecurity, poverty, religious fanaticism, and neglect. The family relocated several times within Stockholm during his youth, and he attended multiple schools, including a harsh institution in Klara that left a lasting impression on him. He was later enrolled at the Stockholm Lyceum, a progressive private school for middle-class boys, where he remained for six years. His mother, whose Pietism shaped his early religious interests, died when he was thirteen. Less than a year after her death, his father married the children's governess, Emilia Charlotta Pettersson. Strindberg passed his graduation examination in May 1867 and enrolled at Uppsala University that September.

During his years between Uppsala and Stockholm, Strindberg worked variously as a substitute schoolteacher, a pharmacy assistant in Lund, a private tutor, and eventually as an extra at the Royal Theatre in Stockholm. He returned to Uppsala University in January 1870 to study aesthetics and modern languages, and it was during this period that he first encountered the ideas of Charles Darwin, Søren Kierkegaard, and Georg Brandes. He co-founded the Rune Society, a small literary club whose members adopted pseudonyms drawn from the ancient Teutonic alphabet; Strindberg took the name Frö, after the god of fertility. A one-act comedy in verse, In Rome, about the sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, was accepted by the Royal Theatre and premièred there on 13 September 1870. A subsequent historical play, The Outlaw, opened at the Royal Theatre on 16 October 1871 and, despite hostile reviews, earned him an audience with King Charles XV, who supported his studies with a payment of 200 riksdaler.

Strindberg completed a first draft of his first major work, Master Olof, a play about Olaus Petri, towards the end of 1871. The Royal Theatre rejected it in September 1872, prompting decades of rewrites and deepening his contempt for official institutions. The play did not receive its première until 1881, at the New Theatre, when Strindberg was thirty-two, marking his theatrical breakthrough. In his naturalistic dramas The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), and Creditors (1889), he built on the accomplishments of Henrik Ibsen's prose problem plays while responding to Émile Zola's manifesto "Naturalism in the Theatre" and the example of André Antoine's Théâtre Libre. In Miss Julie, characterization replaces plot as the central dramatic element, and the determining role of heredity and environment on the characters is emphasized. Strindberg modeled his short-lived Scandinavian Experimental Theatre, founded in 1889 in Copenhagen, on Antoine's theatre, and he explored naturalist theory in essays including "On Psychic Murder" (1887) and "On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre" (1889), as well as in his preface to Miss Julie.

During the 1890s, Strindberg spent considerable time abroad engaged in scientific experiments and studies of the occult. A series of apparent psychotic episodes between 1894 and 1896, known as his Inferno crisis, led to his hospitalization and return to Sweden. Influenced by the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg following his recovery, he resolved to become what he described as "the Zola of the Occult." In 1898 he returned to playwriting with To Damascus, a dream-play of spiritual pilgrimage, a form he also employed in The Great Highway (1909). His A Dream Play (1902) attempted to dramatize the workings of the unconscious through the abolition of conventional dramatic time and space and through the splitting, doubling, merging, and multiplication of its characters, making it an important precursor to both expressionism and surrealism. He also returned to historical drama, the genre with which he had begun his career. From 1907, he helped run the Intimate Theatre in Stockholm, a small-scale venue modeled on Max Reinhardt's Kammerspielhaus, which staged his chamber plays, including The Ghost Sonata.

Across a career spanning four decades, Strindberg wrote more than sixty plays and more than thirty works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics. He worked as a playwright, novelist, poet, essayist, and painter, and is considered the father of modern Swedish literature. His novel The Red Room (1879) has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel. While in Sweden he is recognized across all these forms, internationally he is known primarily as a playwright, with works such as The Father, The Dream Play, The Bridal Crown, Dance of Death, and Barbara's Wedding reaching stages including Broadway.