22 Facts About August Strindberg

1.

August Strindberg helped to run the Intimate Theatre from 1907, a small-scale theatre, modeled on Max Reinhardt's, that staged his chamber plays.

2.

August Strindberg was born on 22 January 1849 in Stockholm, Sweden, the third surviving son of Carl Oscar August Strindberg and Eleonora Ulrika Norling.

3.

August Strindberg was moved to the school in Jakob in 1860, which he found far more pleasant, though he remained there for only a year.

4.

August Strindberg passed his graduation examination in May 1867 and enrolled at the Uppsala University, where he began on 13 September.

5.

August Strindberg first left Uppsala in 1868 to work as a schoolteacher, but then studied chemistry for some time at the Institute of Technology in Stockholm in preparation for medical studies, later working as a private tutor before becoming an extra at the Royal Theatre in Stockholm.

6.

August Strindberg returned to Uppsala University in January 1870 to study aesthetics and modern languages and to work on a number of plays.

7.

From December 1874, August Strindberg worked for eight years as an assistant librarian at the Royal Library.

8.

August Strindberg and Siri's daughter Karin was born on 26 February 1880.

9.

Buoyant from the reception of The Red Room, August Strindberg swiftly completed The Secret of the Guild, an historical drama set in Uppsala at the beginning of the 15th century about the conflict between two masons over the completion of the city cathedral, which opened at the Royal Theatre on 3 May 1880 ; Siri played Margaretha.

10.

From 1881, at the invitation of Edvard Brandes, August Strindberg began to contribute articles to the Morgenbladet, a Copenhagen daily newspaper.

11.

In 1884 August Strindberg wrote a collection of short stories, Getting Married, that presented women in an egalitarian light and for which he was tried for and acquitted of blasphemy in Sweden.

12.

From November 1887 to April 1889, August Strindberg stayed in Copenhagen.

13.

August Strindberg wrote the play with a Parisian stage in mind, in particular the Theatre Libre, founded in 1887 by Andre Antoine.

14.

August 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 firmly returned to literary writing; Inferno, Legends and Jacob Wrestling were written there.

15.

In 1903, August Strindberg planned to write a grand cycle of plays based on world history, but the idea soon faded.

16.

August Strindberg wrote another historical drama in 1908 after the Royal Theatre convinced him to put on a new play for its sixtieth birthday.

17.

In 1909, August Strindberg thought he might get the Nobel Prize in Literature, but instead lost to Selma Lagerlof, the first woman and first Swede to win the award.

18.

August Strindberg died on 14 May 1912 at the age of 63.

19.

The antisemitic outbursts were particularly pronounced in the early 1880s, when August Strindberg dedicated an entire chapter in a work of social and political satire, Det nya riket, dedicated to heckling Swedish Jews.

20.

In 1909, Branting remarked on August Strindberg's shifting political and cultural posture, on the occasion of the author's sixtieth birthday:.

21.

In 1895 August Strindberg met Camille Flammarion and became a member of the Societe astronomique de France.

22.

August Strindberg had a brief affair in Berlin with Dagny Juel before his marriage to Frida; it has been suggested that the news of her murder in 1901 was the reason he cancelled his honeymoon with his third wife, Harriet.