August Strindberg

August Strindberg was a prolific Swedish playwright, poet, essayist and painter. Strindberg’s career spanned almost fifty years, during which time he wrote sixty plays, which often drew from his personal experiences. Strindberg experimented with a multitude of dramatic forms throughout his career. While Strindberg (along with his Norwegian contemporary Henrik Ibsen) is widely considered to be one of the fathers of Naturalistic Drama for plays like The Father and Miss Julie, he also turned to Expressionism and Surrealism is his later dramatic works like Dream Play and Ghost Sonata, which were inspired by his growing fascination with the occult and the workings of his own subconscious. Plagued by the poverty of his childhood and adolescence, Strindberg’s dramatic work is largely concerned with issues of class, property and capitalism. A series of nervous breakdowns between 1894 and 1896 (known as his “Inferno Period”) led Strindberg to focus more specifically on psychological and spiritual drama late in his career, asking broader questions about the nature of God and of the soul. In Sweden, Strindberg is considered to be the father of modern Swedish literature, and his novel The Red Room is frequently called the “first modern Swedish novel.”