August Strindberg

Johan August Strindberg (1849 to 1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist, and painter whose career spanned four decades and produced more than 60 plays and more than 30 works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics. A bold experimenter who often drew directly on his own experience, he moved from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama, and historical drama toward anticipations of later expressionist and surrealist technique, and he is considered the father of modern Swedish literature; his 1879 novel The Red Room is frequently described as the first modern Swedish novel. His plays The Father, Miss Julie, and Creditors, written between 1887 and 1889, established him as a leading naturalist dramatist, while later works such as To Damascus and A Dream Play turned toward dream-like dramatizations of the unconscious that influenced the rise of expressionism and surrealism in theatre. In Sweden he is remembered across all these forms; elsewhere he is known chiefly as a playwright.