Václav Havel Biography

Playwright / Political Leader / President of the Czech Republic

Václav Havel was a playwright and political dissenter who became president of the Czech Republic after his country was freed from Soviet domination late in the 20th century. Havel's family was well-to-do enough that in communist Czechoslovakia he was not allowed to study the humanities in secondary school. Instead he studied at a technical school and worked as a lab technician. He also wrote plays and poems, and by the 1960s had a reputation in literary circles. His plays included The Garden Party (1963) and The Increased Difficulty of Concentration (1968). His outspoken critiques of the Communist government made it difficult for him to have his works published in Czechoslovakia, and he spent a total of nearly five years in and out of jail for his politics. In 1989 Havel emerged on the world stage as the leader of the democratic movement, and after the fall of communism he became the president of Czechoslovakia. Havel resigned in 1992 when it became clear that internal divisions were coming to a head, and in 1993 he was elected the first president of the newly-separate Czech Republic. He was re-elected in 1998 and served until February of 2003. Since then he has served as an elder statesman and international lecturer; he was an artist-in-residence at New York City's Columbia University in 2006.

Extra credit: After being elected as president of Czechoslovakia, Havel brought in American rock musician Frank Zappa and gave him a position in the ministry of culture.

Another post-communist president of Havel's era was Russian Boris Yeltsin... Other famous Czechs include Madeleine Albright, Eva Herzigova, Sigmund Freud and Robert Maxwell.