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 hospitalizat…