Book excerpt: Black Banners, written in 1904, is August Strindberg's last major novel of social criticism. It embodies an attack on the decadence and immorality he perceived in the literary circles and cultural life of Stockholm at the turn of twentieth century and led to the so-called «Strindberg Feud». It is considered by many to be the most notorious roman à clef in Swedish literature and it occasioned the greatest scandal of a career marked by controversy.