August strindberg is one of the founders of the modern theatre, a playwright whom Bernard Shaw considered "the only genuinely Shakespearean modern dramatist" and of whom Sean O'Casey exclaimed, "Strindberg, Strindberg, Strindberg, the greatest of them all."

This collection offers the most famous of his plays. It includes three examples of his naturalism (The Father, 1887; Miss Julie, 1888; The Stronger, 1890), two of his expressionism (A Dream Play, 1902; The Ghost Sonata, 1907), and Easter, a play whose interest derives from its defying either of these categories.

In these new translations by Elizabeth Sprigge, whose biography of Strindberg is the standard work on that figure, the American reader will have his first opportunity to know the true genius of the great Swedish playwright, for Miss Sprigge's unique achievement has been to render the original texts into an English that is at once fluent and accurate and to provide plays that capture the full vigor and impact of the original.