The definitive biography of the playwright who become a president: Vaclav Havel, the final president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the new Czech Republic

Vaclav Havel is revered as one of the 20th-century's great playwrights, dissidents, and honest champions of democracy.

Beginning as a playwright intimately involved in the Prague theatre scene, Havel moved steadily into activism and political dissidence, resulting in imprisonment and culminating in his remarkable election as president in the last days of Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia. He would oversee the peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia into two modern democracies, and his fourteen-year tenure as president was critical to the development of peace and prosperity in the region.

But who was this man, the president who never sought political power, the playwright who stumbled into high office? In this study, John Keane reveals a Havel so far unseen, dramatising the key moments of joy, misery, triumph and tragedy on which his life has turned.