The Author
Johan August Strindberg was born in Stockholm in 1849, the son of a shipping agent and a local
serving maid. After desultory studies in Uppsala, he wrote his first major play, Master Olof, in 1872. It was
not performed until 1881, and supporting himself as a journalist, teacher and librarian he eventually made
his breakthrough in 1879 with The Red Room, a novel which owes much to Balzac and Dickens. He married his
first wife, Siri von Essen, an actress, in 1877 and between 1883 and 1889 they lived abroad, in France,
Switzerland, Germany and Denmark. In 1884 he was tried for blasphemy over a collection of short stories,
Getting Married. His international breakthrough came with the major naturalist plays of the 1880s, The
Father, Miss Julie (1888) and Creditors, but in 1892 he turned his back on Sweden and on the theatre and
spent several more years abroad, devoting himself to the natural sciences and to alchemy. When he resumed
writing plays in 1898 he produced 22 in four years. Several of these, including To Damascus and A Dream Play,
helped revolutionise the European theatre. He divorced Siri in 1891 but was married again, to the Austrian
journalist Frida Uhl (1893-7) and the Norwegian actress Harriet Bosse (1901-4). Although best known for his
plays, Strindberg was also a painter and photographer as well as a prolific writer of novels, short stories,
poetry, essays and works of history, sociology and linguistics. He was always a controversial figure in
Swedish public life, and contributed, through his writing, to the discussion of a wide range of issues. He
died in Stockholm in 1912.
