Friedrich Duerrenmatt; Rebel Swiss Author

Prolific Swiss writer Friedrich Duerrenmatt, ever-rebellious author of countless plays, novels and essays, died of a heart attack early Friday, his publishers announced. He was 69.

Duerrenmatt’s collected works, running to 40 volumes, include his first big success, “Romulus the Great,” and his later “The Visit,” “The Physicists,” “Christmas,” “The Fellow Traveller,” “Play Strindberg” and “The Rebel.”

A huge man, Duerrenmatt was not always easy to get along with, mainly because severe diabetes made him moody.

Born Jan. 5, 1921, in Konolfingen in German-speaking Switzerland near the capital of Bern, he lived most of his writing life in Neuchatel, in the French-speaking part of the country.

His novels and plays--he was also a theater producer--won him international awards, including Germany’s Schiller Prize.

Duerrenmatt was a doctor of literature at Temple University in Philadelphia. He served as a “writer-in-residence” lecturer at USC in 1981.

Son of a parson and pacifist, he was one of Switzerland’s two best- known contemporary writers, the other being Max Frisch.

He was involved in a literary scandal in 1981 when an Austrian journalist, Andre Mueller, published a long interview citing attacks by Duerrenmatt on other writers such as Gunther Grass, Rolf Hochhuth, Heinrich Boell, Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Frisch.

Duerrenmatt never denied giving the interview but said he had been speaking off the record, did not know he was being recorded, and that remarks were taken out of context.