August Strindberg’s childhood was fraught with poverty, emotional insecurity, neglect and religious fanaticism. In his childhood, he was an enthusiast of photography, religion and natural science. He wanted to enroll in university for Medical Studies but he failed his chemistry exam. He then reapplied to study Aesthetic and Modern Languages. During his time in university, he served as pharmacy assistant in Lund, as substitute primary teacher and as private teacher to make money to pay for his tuition since his father won’t pay.

In his early twenties, despondent over his failures as an actor, August Strindberg determined to take his life. He climbed up into the small attic in which he lived and swallowed an opium pill, expecting to die. But he did not die. Instead, he fell into a deep sleep, and when he awoke his mind was seething with memories of childhood. He began to arrange his thoughts feverishly on paper, and in four days he completed his first play. It was then that he knew he would be a writer. His initial plays weren’t received well and his career stumbled. On January 9, 1879 Strindberg was declared bankrupt. Luckily, his novel “The Red Room” was published that year, earning him fame across Scandinavia.

After divorcing his third wife, Strindberg became an alcoholic and had trouble writing for a period of time. He would enter a period christened the Inferno Crisis by historians. During this period, he became interested in the Symbolist movement of the visual arts and was associated with such artists as Edvard Munch in Berlin and Paul Gauguin in Paris. He would also associate himself with a Satanists, medical practitioners and leading researchers in Psychology. He would even go to write that writing-fiction that is- is detestable and theft of people’s experiences.

He finally overcame his crisis through a religious conversion that he described in Inferno (1898). In Inferno he admits he faced bouts of mental imbalance. Personal letters to family and friends of that period reveal a fear of insanity and suspicion of being spied on. After separating with his first wife Siri, Strindberg will move on to re-marry twice and have 5 children in total. He had 3 daughters and 2 sons.