Strindberg's Letters

This is the first major collection in English of August
Strindberg's letters, the most vital and wide-ranging body of
correspondence in Scandinavian literature. Of ten thousand
surviving letters, Michael Robinson has selected and
translated more than five hundred of the most important,
which trace Strindberg's development and provide a
comprehensive view of the life and work of this towering
figure in European literary and theatrical Modernism.

Strindberg's plays, novels, and short stories, which
influenced film and theatre artists from Artaud and the
German Expressionists to Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen,
chart an artistic evolution from Naturalism to the revolt
against realism that issued in Expressionist drama. These
letters help to explain Strindberg's seminal force and
testify to the broad range of his interests, energies, and
imaginative instincts. An essential part of their author's
oeuvre, the letters provide invaluable insight into
Strindberg the artist, the political thinker, and the person,
and were regarded by Strindberg himself as an integral
component of his autobiographical project.

The letters, some of them published here for the first time,
have been meticulously edited and are supported by an
extensive introduction and notes.

Michael Robinson, the editor and translator, lectures in the
Department of English and Drama at Loughborough University of
Technology in Leicester.