international acclaim for his work.Beyond the Horizon (1920), O’Neill’s first full-length play, received the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1936 the literary community showed its approval by awarding O’Neill the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is the first American playwright to have won the award. Literary historians point to his 1920 play, The Emperor Jones as an example of American expressionist theater, as well as The Great God Brown (1926). In these plays, O’Neill uses ghosts, music, lighting, and stage sets to externalize the inner life of his characters. Other O’Neill plays include Desire under the Elms (1924), The Iceman Cometh (1939), and Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1939-41). After a long illness, O’Neill died of pneumonia on November 27, 1953, in Boston, Massachussetts.

August Strindberg (1849–1912) Often referred to by literary historians as the “Father of Expressionism,” (Johan) August Strindberg was born January 22, 1849, in Stockholm, Sweden. His father, though well intentioned, was a strict disciplinarian whose expectations the writer labored under and rebelled against. Strindberg’s lifelong difficulty with women both frustrated him and fueled his creative energies. Strindberg was opposed to the idea of a liberated woman, yet he was also attracted to women who refused to be limited to the role of mother and wife. This conflict contributed to three divorces and a string of failed romances. A novelist and essayist as well as a playwright, Strindberg had his first play produced when he was 21. However, for much of his life he struggled financially, working as a librarian, newsletter editor, tutor, and journalist. His controversial ideas often landed him in trouble, and in 1884 he was tried—yet acquitted— for blasphemy for stories he wrote that belittled women and criticized conventional religious practices. Towards the end of his life, Strindberg achieved critical as well as financial success, and his plays were performed throughout Europe. In 1912, he was awarded the “anti-Nobel Prize” in recognition for the way in which his writing challenged conventions and authority. He died in May of that year from stomach cancer.

Strindberg’s early plays, written in a naturalistic vein, address historical matters using realistic dialogue as the primary means of communication. He developed his expressionist style, which he referred to as “dreamplay,” in his later work. In plays such as The Road to Damascus (1898–1904), The Dream Play (1901), and The Ghost Sonata (1907), Strindberg uses “types” instead of fully developed characters, and incorporates visual elements and music into the action to symbolize humanity’s unconscious desires. In his dream sequences, Strindberg frequently represents humanity’s misery and search for meaning and redemption.

Georg Trakl (1887–1914) Georg Trakl was born February 3, 1887, in Salzburg, Austria, into the middle-class Austrian family of an artistic but emotionally unstable mother. Trakl developed emotional problems as an adolescent. His reading of gloomy writers such as Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Arthur Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Baudelaire only added to his despair, as did his liberal use of various opiates. Trakl wrote frequently but only began to publish regularly after he met Ludwig von Ficker, editor of the journal Der Brenner, who nurtured Trakl’s talent and provided him with a vehicle for his poetry. Trakl’s emotional health deteriorated during World War I, when, as a dispensing chemist, he had to care for a large number of wounded men. Seeing the obscene wounds of soldiers and witnessing their unrelenting pain compounded Trakl’s own misery, and he was hospitalized for depression. In Krakow, Poland, on November 3, 1914, Trakl overdosed on cocaine.

Frank Wedekind (1864–1918) Born Benjamin Franklin Wedekind in Hanover, Germany, on July 24, 1864, Wedekind became one of the first playwrights in Germany to experiment with expressionist techniques. The son of a doctor and an actress, Wedekind studied law before dropping out of school to lead a bohemian life. Wedekind makes his contempt of middle-class society evident in his plays, which attack hypocrisy and repressive sexual mores. In plays such as Pandora’s Box (1904) and Spring’s Awakening (1906), Wedekind graphically depicts themes of sexual repression in an effort to force audiences to change their behavior. He is perhaps best known for Lulu (1905), in which the protagonist, a femme fatale with a monstrous sexuality, is murdered by Jack the Ripper, a serial killer who terrorized London’s streets at the end of the nineteenth century. Wedekind’s didactic approach to theater includes using heavily stylized dialogue, bizarre characters and plots, and a loosely knit episodic structure to jar audiences out of their complacency. Bertolt Brecht praised his work and followed Wedekind’s example in his own plays. Wedekind died of pneumonia in Munich, Germany, on March 9, 1918.