Rebuffed by the refusal of theatrical managers to accept _Master Olof_, he had re-written it in verse. The new edition was published in 1877, and the reception brought its author bitter disappointment, and fuller experience of the indifference which kills. The critics were silent. They ignored the masterpiece of his youth, and presented a deaf ear to the poetry of the heretic. One paper declared the play to be humbug. His old colleagues of the press-table saw no reason for acclamation. The satire which had shone with a mellow light in the sketches of Upsala life was fanned into hot flame through contact with the world of Philistines. Determined to speak his mind untrammelled by accepted standards of literary form, whether poetic or prosaic, historical or modern, he now wrote a novel which he called _The Red Room_. The book was published in 1879, and produced an outburst of anger and admiration. Voltaire's words, "Rien n'est si désagréable que d'être pendu obscurément," had been chosen by Strindberg as a motto for the book and in protest against the treatment he had received. The force and style of _The Red Room_ effectively protected its author from continued obscurity. Strindberg's name was made by this book; henceforth it was the war-cry of opposing factions. As a novel the book fails through lack of cohesive development of character-study and events. As a series of sketches of the follies and vanities which permeate the social hierarchy it compels attention by its direct, speaking style, and the singular freshness and spontaneity of its satire. The central figure of the book is Arvid Falk--Strindberg the idealist--a journalist whose contact with the world results in a series of disillusionments. Everything that is dishonest, cruel, banal, hypocritical and vile in the social system is exposed to view in the pages of _The Red Room_, which still, after thirty years, retain their freshness and the warmth of the burning moral indignation which caused them to be written.