August Strindberg

Born in 1849 in Stockholm, the fourth of twelve children, Strindberg was raised by a father who had gone bankrupt and a mother who had been a barmaid, a social humiliation he never forgot and titled his autobiography The Son of a Servant (1886). He studied intermittently at Uppsala University, never took a degree, and drifted through jobs as a tutor, telegraph clerk, and librarian before the satirical novel The Red Room (1879) made him Sweden's most controversial writer almost overnight. His first marriage to the Finnish aristocrat Siri von Essen ended in a public, vicious divorce that fed directly into The Father (1887) and Miss Julie (1888), the two naturalistic plays that revolutionized European theater with their raw depiction of sexual warfare and class antagonism. A second and third marriage each ended in similar wreckage. In the 1890s Strindberg suffered a prolonged psychological crisis he called his Inferno period, during which he abandoned literature for alchemical experiments, convinced he could synthesize gold. He emerged to write the great chamber plays, including A Dream Play (1901) and The Ghost Sonata (1907), works of hallucinatory intensity that anticipated expressionism and the theater of the absurd by decades. He died of stomach cancer on May 14, 1912, in Stockholm, requesting that a Bible be placed on his chest and that his funeral be held at dawn to avoid the crowds.

During his Inferno crisis in Paris in the 1890s, Strindberg grew convinced invisible enemies were pumping poison gas through his hotel wall and beaming electric currents at him while he slept. He read hidden messages in wallpaper stains and street signs, then spun the whole delusion into the autobiographical novel Inferno.