In twenty-first-century America, August Strindberg (1849–1912) is known as a “classic” writer, but his actual works are familiar primarily to drama students and nonprofit-theater directors. A few of Strindberg’s plays—Miss Julie, The Father, Master Olof, The Dance of Death, The Ghost Sonata, The Stronger—have worked their way into the canon. As much as their excellence, the fact that these works provide some powerful monologues for acting students has ensured their survival there. But does anyone outside of Sweden have any conception of Strindberg the satirist, the radical, the rebel, the humorist, the historian, the novelist, the feminist, the hypnotist, the painter, the photographer, the alchemist, the wild eccentric?

The last big biography of Strindberg was Michael Meyer’s in 1985, a hefty tome that concentrated largely on Strindberg the sexist, racist, and anti-Semite, and compared his character unfavorably with that of the more conventionally liberal Ibsen, whose life Meyer had also penned. All this was very much in keeping with the preoccupations of academia at that time, when biographers and professors found it hard to forgive great authors for their lapses from political virtue. Strindberg, like so many men of his time and place, took some racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic positions. But this was only part of the story, for he was also a political radical who shocked contemporaries with his progressive stands, and at significant moments of his life vigorously championed both Jews and women. He was a deeply complicated man