Rare is the writer who can still rile his countrymen more than a century after his death. But in Sweden, August Strindberg remains lodged under the country’s proverbial skin. The author and playwright, known as much for his gossip-column lifestyle and controversial political views as for his prodigious literary output, died in 1912.

Strindberg wrote in various genres — novels, articles, essays, poems — but outside Sweden he is best known for his plays, including the oft-staged “Miss Julie.” And he was as provocative as he was prolific. “I need to travel to purge myself of Sweden and Swedish stupidity,” Strindberg wrote in a letter to his publisher.

Despite, or perhaps because of, this vitriol, there is an indelible link between the writer and his modern compatriots. “Strindberg is an author that almost all Swedes have a connection to, but maybe not solely to Strindberg’s books, his works, his plays,” said Camilla Larsson, a curator at Stockholm’s Strindberg Museum, during a visit last fall. “Instead, many have ideas and opinions about Strindberg as a person — who he was.”

Image August Strindberg Credit... Herman Anderson/Strindbergsmuseet

It wouldn’t be a stretch to equate Strindberg’s notoriety within Sweden as akin to that of, say, Hemingway in America. Like Hemingway, Strindberg led a life worth writing about — “My fire is the biggest in Sweden,” he declared in a letter in 1876 — and the myth of the man has, over the years, become inextricably tangled with the literary legacy.