Czech absurdist playwright, dissident essayist, and — from 1989 to 2003 — president of Czechoslovakia and then the Czech Republic. Havel grew up in a prominent bourgeois Prague family whose class background excluded him from the universities after the 1948 Communist takeover; he came to the theater through stagehand and dramaturg jobs and produced at the Theatre on the Balustrade in the 1960s the absurdist plays — The Garden Party (1963), The Memorandum (1965), The Increased Difficulty of Concentration (1968) — that established him as one of the leading Central European playwrights of the decade.
The Warsaw Pact invasion of August 1968 ended the Prague Spring and effectively ended Havel's legal theatrical career; the plays were banned, he was forbidden to travel, and he turned increasingly to essays. The 1975 open letter to President Gustáv Husák, the 1977 Charter 77 manifesto (he was one of its three spokesmen), and the 1978 essay "The Power of the Powerless" established him as the central dissident voice of normalized Czechoslovakia. "The Power of the Powerless" — built around the image of the greengrocer who puts a "Workers of the World, Unite!" sign in his shop window because everyone does and to not do so would invite trouble — is the great short theory of the post-totalitarian regime that rules not by terror but by requiring ritual complicity in an ideology no one believes.
He was imprisoned three times for a total of almost five years. Letters to Olga (to his wife, 1983) is the prison correspondence. Then in November 1989 the Velvet Revolution, in which he was the negotiating face of Civic Forum, put him by the end of December in Prague Castle as president — a transition with no exact parallel in 20th-century politics. His presidency was contested in its particulars (the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993; the NATO embrace) but the moral authority was real, and his essays on "living in truth" have outlasted the specific politics.