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interest as to justify the translator’s ambition of rendering the work accessible to the English speaking public.

It constitutes the unpretentious message in the form of biography and reminiscence of one of those relatively few and highly favored individuals who can lay claim to a certain amount of intimate personal contact with the great Swedish author. Furthermore, Gustaf Uddgren possesses such a clear insight into and so profound an appreciation of the complex problems with which Strindberg wrestled unceasingly all his life, as to be entitled to a hearing abroad as well as at home.

The book affords an excellent general survey of the many-sided, turbulent life and activities of Sweden’s foremost author. Here we meet the juvenile poet and indomitable revolter such as he appeared to the people of the seventies; the so-called misogynist who in the eighties caused a world-wide sensation with his Married, his novels, autobiography and naturalistic plays; the wandering scientist, acid psycho-analyst, mystic and paranoiac of the nineties who rises out of his Dantesque Inferno, like the bird Phoenix from his ashes, to produce over a score of dramas—historical, transcendental, social—of such unprecedented excellence as to compare favorably with the greatest dramatic monuments of all times—the Shakespearian. We follow him to his native land after long years of exile on the Continent only to find him rejected, hated and harassed by his own. And finally we retire with him to the Blue Tower where he spends his declining years like a hermit until death claims him on the 14th of May, 1912.