Swedens Boldest

Career Trajectory

Strindberg began as a student playwright at Uppsala University before achieving overnight fame with his debut novel *The Red Room* (1879), a scathing portrait of Swedish bohemia. His theatrical breakthrough came with the 1881 premiere of *Master Olof*—a play written nine years earlier but rejected by the Royal Theatre—which established him as a major dramatist of naturalistic social critique. Over the following three decades, he evolved from psychological realism into radical formal experimentation, creating works like *A Dream Play* and *The Ghost Sonata* that anticipated modernism and expressionism, while simultaneously working as a painter and, near the end of his life, founding the Intimate Theatre to stage his chamber plays.