(,Swedish: (); 22 January 1849 – 14 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg's career spanned four decades, during which time he wrote over sixty plays and more than thirty works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics. A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic , , and history plays, to his anticipations of and dramatic techniques. From his earliest work, Strindberg developed innovative forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition. He is considered the "father" of modern and his (1879) has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel.

In Sweden, Strindberg is known as an essayist, painter, poet, and especially as a novelist and playwright, but in other countries he is known mostly as a playwright.

The rejected his first major play, , in 1872; it was not until 1881, when he was thirty-two, that its première at the gave him his theatrical breakthrough. In his plays (1887), (1888), and (1889), he created naturalistic dramas that – building on the established accomplishments of 's prose while rejecting their use of the structure of the – responded to the call-to-arms of 's manifesto "Naturalism in the Theatre" (1881) and the example set by 's newly established (opened 1887). In Miss Julie, characterisation replaces plot as the predominant dramatic element (in contrast to and the well-made play) and the determining role of and the on the "vacillating, disintegrated" characters is emphasized. Strindberg modeled his short-lived Scandinavian Experimental Theatre (1889) in on Antoine's theatre and he explored the theory of Naturalism in his essays "On Psychic Murder" (1887), "On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre" (1889), and a preface to Miss Julie, the last of which is probably the best-known statement of the principles of the theatrical movement.

During the 1890s he spent significant time abroad engaged in scientific experiments and studies of the occult. A series of psychotic attacks between 1894 and 1896 (referred to as his "Inferno crisis") led to his hospitalization and return to Sweden. Under the influence of the ideas of , he resolved after his recovery to become "the Zola of the Occult". In 1898 he returned to play-writing with , which, like (1909), is a dream-play of spiritual pilgrimage. His (1902) – with its radical attempt to dramatize the workings of the by means of an abolition of conventional dramatic time and space and the splitting, doubling, merging, and multiplication of its characters – was an important precursor to both expressionism and surrealism. He also returned to writing historical drama, the genre with which he had begun his play-writing career. He helped to run the from 1907, a small-scale theatre, modeled on 's Kammerspielhaus, that staged his (such as ).

Early Years

Strindberg's father, Carl Oskar Strindberg, was a bankrupt aristocrat who worked as a steamship agent, and his mother was a former waitress. His childhood was marred by emotional insecurity, poverty, his grandmother's religious fanaticism, and neglect, as he relates in his remarkable autobiography Tjänstekvinnans son (1886–87; The Son of a Servant, 1913). He studied intermittently at the University of Uppsala, preparing in turn for the ministry and a career in medicine but never taking a degree. To earn his living, he worked as a free-lance journalist in Stockholm, as well as at other jobs that he almost invariably lost. Meanwhile he struggled to complete his first important work, the historical drama Mäster Olof (published in 1872), on the theme of the Swedish Reformation, influenced by Shakespeare and by Brand. The Royal Theatre's rejection of Mäster Olof deepened his pessimism and sharpened his for official institutions and traditions. For several years he continued revising the play—later recognized as the first modern Swedish drama—thus delaying his development as a dramatist of contemporary problems.

In 1874 he became a librarian at the Royal Library, and in 1875 he met the Finno-Swedish Siri von Essen, then the unhappy wife of an officer of the guards; two years later they married. Their intense but ultimately disastrous relationship ended in divorce in 1891, when Strindberg, to his great grief, lost the custody of their four children. At first, however, marriage stimulated his writing, and in 1879 he published his first , The Red Room, a satirical account of abuses and frauds in Stockholm society: this was something new in Swedish fiction and made its author nationally famous.

He also wrote more plays, of which Lucky Peter's Travels (1881) contains the most biting social . In 1883, the year after he published Det nya riket ("The New Kingdom"), a withering on contemporary , Strindberg left Stockholm with his family and for six years moved restlessly about the Continent. Although he was then approaching a state of complete mental breakdown, he produced a great number of plays, novels, and stories. The publication in 1884 of the first volume of his collected stories, Married, led to a prosecution for . He was acquitted, but the case affected his mind, and he imagined himself persecuted, even by Siri.

He returned to drama with new intensity, and the conflict between the sexes inspired some of the outstanding works written at this time, such as , , and The Creditors. All of these were written in total revolt against contemporary social conventions. In these bold and concentrated works, he combined the techniques of dramatic —including unaffected , stark rather than luxurious scenery, and the use of stage props as symbols—with his own of psychology, thereby inaugurating a new movement in European drama. The People of Hemsö, a vigorous novel about the Stockholm skerries (rocky islands), always one of Strindberg's happiest sources of inspiration, was also produced during this intensively creative phase.

The years after his return to Sweden in 1889 were lonely and unhappy. Even though revered as a famous writer who had become the voice of modern Sweden, he was by now an alcoholic unable to find steady employment. In 1892 he went abroad again, to Berlin. His second marriage, to a young Austrian journalist, Frida Uhl, followed in 1893; they finally parted in Paris in 1895.

A period of literary sterility, emotional and physical stress, and considerable mental instability culminated in a kind of religious conversion, the crisis that he described in Inferno. During these years Strindberg devoted considerable time to experiments in and to the study of .

Late Years

His new faith, coloured by mysticism, re-created him as a writer. The immediate result was a drama in three parts, To Damascus, in which he depicts himself as "the Stranger," a wanderer seeking spiritual peace and finding it with another character, "the Lady," who resembles both Siri and Frida.

By this time Strindberg had again returned to Sweden, settling first in and then, in 1899, in Stockholm, where he lived until his death. The summers he often spent among his beloved skerries. His view that life is ruled by the "Powers," punitive but righteous, was reflected in a series of historical plays that he began in 1889. Of these, Gustav Vasa is the best, masterly in its firmness of construction, characterization, and its vigorous dialogue. In 1901 he married the young Norwegian actress Harriet Bosse; in 1904 they parted, and again Strindberg lost the child, his fifth.

Yet his last marriage, this "spring in winter," as he called it, inspired, among other works, the plays The Dance of Death and A Dream Play, as well as the charming autobiography Ensam ("Alone") and some lyrical poems. Renewed bitterness after his parting from his last wife provoked the grotesquely satirical novel Svarta Fanor (1907; "Black Banners"), which attacked the vices and follies of Stockholm's literary coteries, as Strindberg saw them. Kammarspel ("Chamber Plays"), written for the little Intima Theatre, which Strindberg ran for a time with a young producer, Falck, embody further developments of his dramatic technique: of these, is the most fantastic, anticipating much in later European drama. His last play, The Great Highway, a symbolic presentation of his own life, appeared in 1909.

Legacy

To the end, Strindberg debated current social and political ideas (returning to the radical views of his youth) in polemical articles, while his was expounded in the aphoristic Zones of the Spirit (1907–12). He was ignored in death, as in life, by the but mourned by his countrymen as their greatest writer. On Swedish life and letters he has exercised a lasting influence and is admired for his originality, his extraordinary vitality, and his powerful imagination, which enabled him to transform autobiographic material into dramatic of exceptional brilliance.

The pregnant, style of Strindberg's early novels and, especially, of his short stories, brought about a long-overdue regeneration of Swedish prose style, and The Son of a Servant gave perhaps the strongest impulse since Confessions to the publication of discreditable self-revelations. His greatest influence, however, was exerted in the theatre, through his critical writings (such as the introduction to Miss Julie), his plays, and the production devices that their staging dictated. The continuous, brutal action and the extreme of the dialogue of Miss Julie and other plays written between 1887 and 1893 reached the ne plus ultra of naturalistic .

August Strindberg's family members:

Spouse/Ex-: Siri Von Essen (1877–91) Frida Uhl

Father: Carl Oscar Strindberg

Mother: Eleonora Ulrika Norling