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August Strindberg (1849-1912) was among the first modern playwrights to examine the Gordian knot of family, class differences, and sexual desire. In his brilliant and bitter and sometimes mad work, men are generally predisposed not to like women, and women are given to spitting in the faces of the men whom they have, at one time or another, professed to love--or not love, exactly, but need. And it is the Swedish-born Strindberg's horror of, and fascination with, need in all human beings--the need for authority, the need to be defiled or overcome--that gives his work its peculiar lasting power. His short, clipped dialogue is often suffused with suspicion, while his ...