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Overview
Novelist, satirist, poet, photographer, painter, alchemist, and hellraiser—August Strindberg was all these, and yet he is principally known, in Arthur Miller's words, as "the mad inventor of modern theater" who led playwriting out of the polite drawing room into the snakepit of psychological warfare. This biography, supported by extensive new research, describes the eventful and complicated life of one of the great literary figures in world literature. Sue Prideaux organizes Strindberg's story into a gripping and highly readable narrative that both illuminates his work and restores humor and humanity to a man often shrugged off as too difficult.
Best known for his play Miss Julie, Strindberg wrote sixty other plays, three books of poetry, eighteen novels, and nine autobiographies. Even more than most, Strindberg is a writer whose life sheds invaluable light on his work. Prideaux explores Strindberg's many art-life connections, revealing for the first time the originals who inspired the characters of Miss Julie and her servant Jean, the bizarre circumstances in which the play was written, and the real suicide that inspired the shattering ending of the play. Recounting the playwright's journey through the "real" world as well as the world of belief and ideas, Prideaux marks the centenary of Strindberg's death in 1912 with a biography worthy of the man who laid the foundation for Western drama through the twentieth century and even into the twenty-first.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review.In this exhaustively researched and beautifully produced biography, Prideaux (Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream) tackles the peripatetic and tumultuous life of August Strindberg, the famously difficult 19th-century Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, photographer, and painter. Prideaux shows a clear fondness for her subject, portraying him as a deeply earnest and vulnerable man, and an almost comically tireless seeker after great truths-whether of literature, science, or the occult. Though Prideaux occasionally glosses over some of Strindberg's nastier prejudices, including his misogyny and anti-Semitism, her efforts to balance the more incendiary elements of a complex and fallible man serve her intention of making Strindberg a more "approachable" figure. By discussing the conservatism of Strindberg's Sweden and the new philosophies of consciousness and evolution swirling through Europe, Prideaux does an excellent job of locating Strindberg in his period-she convincingly sets Strindberg's work at the leading edge of modernism, and demonstrates the ways in which his own life and inner machinations were his most important sources of intellectual and artistic inspiration. A must-read for fans of Strindberg, Prideaux's tome is substantial and interesting enough to please anyone looking for a great bio. Includes an index, bibliography, chronology, notes, and numerous illustrations and photos.
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