Vaclav Havel was born to a bourgeois family in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1936. As a youngster, the future playwright, political dissident and president of his country worked at various odd jobs and took evening classes at the gymnasium. He also studied chemistry and economics. After serving in the military for two years, he became a stage hand at a Prague theater while studying stagecraft. During this time, the early 1960s, Havel wrote his first plays, which were eventually of a clearly absurdist nature. In them, he ridiculed the arbitrariness of bureaucracy operating under police state regulations, as was the case in Czechoslovakia.
But Czechoslovak cultural life was also becoming more diverse and free during the 1960s, and Havel became a prominent free spirit. He criticized government censorship at a writers congress in 1967 and rose to the chairmanship of the Independent Writers Union the following year. After the Warsaw Pact crushed the Prague Spring in 1968, the new regime banned Havel from all forms of theater work. For several years he worked at a menial job in a brewery in the small Czech town of Trutnov. He continued to write, and plays such as "Audience" were performed outside Czechoslovakia.
After the 1975 East-West Helsinki agreements, including provisions on human rights, Havel became active in testing his government's commitment to these clauses. For example, he wrote "Open Letter to Gustav Husak," the Czechoslovak party leader, warning him that the regime could not suppress individual freedom forever. In 1977 he was a founding spokesman of Charter 77, an act that got him arrested and jailed for a few months. In 1979 the authorities sentenced him to 4 1/2 years in jail for his opposition work. It is from this time period that we have Havel's famous "Letters to Olga," his wife, in which he reflected on the significance of his opposition stance and the heavy price he was paying for it. While ambiguous at times, he concluded that his principled stance was the only one possible for him, and that emigration was not an option.
Already a well-know playwright in the West, during the 1980s Havel also gained widespread recognition as a dissident, receiving the Dutch Erasmus Prize in 1986. In 1989, he helped found Civic Forum, the first legal opposition movement in his country since the late 1940s. Later that year, after the "Velvet Revolution" had deposed the communist dictatorship, Havel was chosen president of Czechoslovakia. In spite of some serious health problems, he kept this position through the breakup of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and has guided the Czech Republic through a successful transition to a liberal, free-market system and NATO membership.
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