Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 20. Chapters: Ingmar Bergman, August Strindberg, Kristina Lugn, Fredrica Lof, Margareta Seuerling, Mimi Pollak, Alf Sjoberg, Susan Taslimi, Stig Olin, Claes Fellbom, Lars Amble, Concordia Selander, Olof Molander, Hjalmar Selander. Excerpt: Johan August Strindberg (.); 22 January 1849 - 14 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, painter, and essayist. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg's career spanned four decades, during which time he wrote over 60 plays and more than 30 works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics. A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama, and history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques. From his earliest work, Strindberg developed forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition so innovative that many were to become technically possible to stage only with the advent of film. He is considered the "father" of modern Swedish literature and his The Red Room (1879) has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel. The Royal Theatre rejected his first major play, Master Olof, in 1872; it was not until 1881, at the age of 32, that its premiere at the New Theatre gave him his theatrical breakthrough. In his plays The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), and Creditors (1889), he created naturalistic dramas that-building on the established accomplishments of Henrik Ibsen's prose problem plays while rejecting their use of the structure of the well-made play-responded to the call-to-arms of Emile Zola's manifesto "Naturalism in the Theatre" (1881) and the example set by Andre Antoine's newly-established Theatre Libre (opened 1887). In Miss Julie, characterisation...