FORMER PRESIDENT OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA
1936–

Vaclav Havel is a Czech intellectual, writer, dramatist, and dissident who became the first president of Czechoslovakia after the yoke of the communist dictatorship was discarded as a consequence of the "Velvet Revolution" in 1989. He was viewed by many in Czechoslovakia and in the larger West as one of the founding fathers of democracy in post-Cold War Europe.

Vaclav Havel was born in 1936 to bourgeois parents who would lose much after the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia after World War II (1939–1945). He was apparently a precocious child, and by the time he was fifteen, he was writing poetry, had founded a literary group among his high school friends that organized symposia, and even published a typewritten magazine. Despite his interests in the arts, he was not admitted to the Academy of Performing Arts and, instead, entered the Czechoslovak University of Technology to study...