His insistent and torturous need for exact self-analysis, coupled with an equally compelling need to tell the truth, made all his writings strongly subjective. His autobiography--"the story of a soul's evolution"--is an intimate revelation of his power to dissect his past selves, to record minute incidents and to extract reflexes from the bundle of emotions and thoughts which go to make up character. Nothing is lost, nothing is too insignificant for careful examination in the microscope under which he places every cell of himself. The confessions of Rousseau and Tolstoy have not the nakedness of Strindberg's truth about himself. Though he never loses sympathy with himself, he scorns excuses and exposes his sins and his follies with ruthless exactitude. There is a strange combination of the coolly analysing psychologist and the passionate flagellant in the descriptions which range from the struggles of childhood, through the Inferno-period of 1896, to the calm of _Alone_, and the final visions of light. The autobiographical novel in four volumes which was published under the titles _The Bondswoman's Son, Fermentation Time, In the Red Room_ and _The Author_, was written at the age of thirty-seven, and, though the impressions of childhood are recorded with deep insight into the child's mind, we cannot forget that they were written down and interpreted by the man who had behind him years of tumultuous and bitter struggle for self-expression, and before whom the banquet of life seemed reduced to dead-sea fruit. In the preface to the fifth edition of _The Bondswoman's Son_, he tells us that when writing the volume he believed he stood before death, "for I was tired, saw no longer any object in life, considered myself superfluous, thrown away." * * * * *