August Strindberg

August Strindberg was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist, and painter whose first major play was rejected by the Royal Theatre in 1872; he didn't reach the stage until 1881, at thirty-two. Between 1887 and 1889 he answered Zola's call for naturalism with The Father, Miss Julie, and Creditors - dramas that ditched plot for characterisation and made heredity and environment the forces driving "vacillating, disintegrated" people. The 1890s took him abroad into scientific experiments and occult studies, then into apparent psychotic attacks between 1894 and 1896 that led to hospitalization and a return to Sweden. Under the influence of Emanuel Swedenborg, he came back in 1898 with To Damascus and later A Dream Play (1902), which abolished conventional time and space and let characters split, double, and merge - a radical attempt to stage the unconscious that prefigured both expressionism and surrealism. He helped run Stockholm's Intimate Theatre from 1907, staging his chamber plays until his death in 1912, and left behind more than 60 plays, over 30 works of fiction, and the title "father" of modern Swedish literature.