[2][3][4] A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg wrote more than 60 plays and more than 30 works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics during his career, which spanned four decades.

[12] In Miss Julie, characterisation replaces plot as the predominant dramatic element (in contrast to melodrama and the well-made play) and the determining role of heredity and the environment on the "vacillating, disintegrated" characters is emphasized.

[36] After abandoning a draft of a play about Eric XIV of Sweden halfway through in the face of criticism from the Rune Society, on 30 March he completed a one-act comedy in verse called In Rome about Bertel Thorvaldsen, which he had begun the previous autumn.

[39][41] Taking his cue from William Shakespeare, he began to use colloquial and realistic speech in his historical dramas, which challenged the convention that they should be written in stately verse.

[39][42] Depressed by Uppsala, he stayed in Stockholm, returning to the university in April to pass an exam in Latin and in June to defend his thesis on Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger's Romantic tragedy Earl Haakon (1802).

I want to turn everything upside down to see what lies beneath; I believe we are so webbed, so horribly regimented, that no spring-cleaning is possible, everything must be burned, blown to bits, and then we can start afresh...[79]Strindberg and Siri's daughter Karin was born on 26 February 1880.

[87] Ludvig Josephson (the new artistic director of Stockholm's New Theatre) agreed to stage Master Olof, eventually opting for the prose version – the five-hour-long production opened on 30 December 1881 under the direction of August Lindberg to favourable reviews.

[88] While this production of Master Olof was his breakthrough in the theatre, Strindberg's five-act fairy-tale play Lucky Peter's Journey, which opened on 22 December 1883, brought him his first significant success, although he dismissed it as a potboiler.

[94] Two groups "led by influential members of the upper classes, supported by the right-wing press" probably instigated the prosecution; at the time, most people in Stockholm thought that Queen Sophia was behind it.

He wrote on subjects such as botany, chemistry, and optics before returning to literature with the publication of Inferno (1897), a (half fictionalized) account of his "wilderness years" in Austria and Paris, then a collection of short stories, Legends, and a semi-dramatic novella, Jacob Wrestling (both printed in the same book 1898).

Both volumes aroused curiosity and controversy, not least due to the religious element; earlier, Strindberg had been known to be indifferent or hostile to religion and especially priests, but now he had undergone some sort of conversion to a personal faith.

Strindberg believed for the rest of his life that the relationship between the transcendental and the real world was described by a series of "correspondences" and that everyday events were really messages from above of which only the enlightened could make sense.

Strindberg had spent the tail end of 1896 and most of 1897 in the university town of Lund in southern Sweden, a sojourn during which he made a number of new friendships, felt his mental stability and health improving and also firmly returned to literary writing; Inferno, Legends and Jacob Wrestling were written there.

His other works, such as Days of Loneliness (1903), The Roofing Ceremony (1907), and The Scapegoat (1907), and the novels The Gothic Rooms (1904) and Black Banners Genre Scenes from the Turn of the Century,[106] (1907) have been viewed as precursors to Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka.

[112] Eugene O'Neill, upon receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, dedicated much of his acceptance speech to describing Strindberg's influence on his work, and referred to him as "that greatest genius of all modern dramatists.

He disliked the expository character backgrounds that characterise the work of Henrik Ibsen and rejected the convention of a dramatic "slice of life" because he felt that the resulting plays were mundane and uninteresting.

Röda rummet (The Red Room), Hemsöborna (The People of Hemsö), Giftas (Getting Married), En dåres försvarstal (The Confession of a Fool), and Inferno remain among his most celebrated novels, representing different genres and styles.

He often voiced political views privately to friends and literary acquaintances, phrased in a no-holds-barred jargon of scathing attacks, drastic humor, and flippant hyperbole.

[117][118] However, Strindberg's socialism was undogmatic and rooted in a ruthless critique of state, church, school, press, and economy in which he aimed at pitting the people against kings, economists, priests, and merchants.

However, in contrast to the Marxist-influenced socialism then rising within the Swedish labor movement, Strindberg espoused an older type of agrarian radicalism accompanied by spiritual and even mystical ideas.

Although anti-Jewish prejudice was far from uncommon in wider society in the 1880s, Jan Myrdal notes that "the entire liberal and democratic intelligentsia of the time distanced themselves from the older, left-wing antisemitism of August Strindberg.

Despite his reactionary attitudes on issues such as women's rights and his conservative, mystical turn from the early 1890s, Strindberg remained popular with some in the socialist-liberal camp on the strength of his past radicalism and his continued salience as a literary modernizer.

His former ally and friend, Social Democrat leader Hjalmar Branting, now dismissed the author as a "disaster" who had betrayed his past ideals for a reactionary, mystical elitism.

But to the Strindberg of Black Banners [1907] and A Blue Book [1907-1912], who, in the shadows of Inferno [1898] has been converted to a belief in the sickly, empty gospels of mysticism – let us wish, from our hearts, that he may once again become his past self.

In April 1910, Strindberg launched a series of unprompted, insult-laden attacks on popular conservative symbols, viciously thrashing the nationalist cult of former king Charles XII ("pharao worship"), the lauded poet Verner von Heidenstam ("the spirit-seer of Djursholm"), and the famous author and traveler Sven Hedin ("the humbug explorer").

The Feud served to revive Strindberg's reputation as an implacable enemy of bourgeois tastes, while also reestablishing beyond doubt his centrality to Swedish culture and politics.

Though Strindberg was friends with Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin, and was thus familiar with modern trends, the spontaneous and subjective expressiveness of his landscapes and seascapes can be ascribed also to the fact that he painted only in periods of personal crisis.

He produced a type of photogram that encouraged the development and growth of crystals on the photographic emulsion, sometimes exposed for lengthy periods to heat or cold in the open air or at night facing the stars.

In the curious and experimental 1897 work Inferno – a dark, paranoid, and confusing tale of his time in Paris, written in French, which takes the form of an autobiographical journal – Strindberg, as the narrator, claims to have successfully performed alchemical experiments and cast black magic spells on his daughter.

Much of Inferno indicates that the author suffered from paranoid delusions, as he writes of being stalked through Paris, haunted by evil forces, and targeted with mind-altering electric rays emitted by an "infernal machine" covertly installed in his hotel.