A Life That Mattered :: R.I.P. Vaclav Havel :: Czech dissident, playwright, politician dead at 75

Havel, a puckish, absurdist playwright turned political activist, spent four and a half years in prison for opposing Czechslovakia’s Communist government before emerging as a leader of the Velvet Revolution that swept it aside in 1989. He went on to become president of Czechoslovakia, and of the Czech Republic when the country split in two at the end of 1992.