Bernhard’s parallel career as a playwright began in 1970, as did his long collaboration with the director Claus Peymann, who directed Bernhard’s first full-length play, A Party for Boris, at Hamburg’s Schauspielhaus. A number of prestigious Austrian theaters soon adopted this play for their own programs. Popular interest in Bernhard’s theatrical work of this period was demonstrated by the fact that, in 1974, Vienna’s Burgtheater performed his new play The Hunting Party, while the Salzburg Festival presented The Force of Habit. Other important productions directed by Peymann included Der Ignorant und der Wahnsinnige (The Ignoramus and the Madman) at the Salzburg Festival in 1972, the premiere of The President at the Burgtheater, Minetti in 1976, with the actor Bernhard Minetti in the title role, and, in 1979, the premiere of Der Weltverbesserer (The Universal Reformer).

Nineteen seventy-five, an especially important year in Bernhard’s evolution, saw the publication of one of his fictional masterpieces, the novel Correction, as well as An Indication of the Cause, the first volume of the autobiographical work, the writing of which would continue for another seven years and which would eventually be collected in one volume as Gathering Evidence (where it appears as the second chapter). The accelerating rhythm of Bernhard’s literary production was marked in 1978 by the publication of four new works, including a play entitled Immanuel Kant, the second volume of his autobiography, and two major works of fiction, The Voice Imitator and Yes. In 1979 Erzählungen (Stories) gathered together the major short fiction that Bernhard had produced over the previous decade.

The final decade of Bernhard’s prematurely concluded career began in 1980 with a novel, The Cheap-Eaters, followed in 1981 by the arrival of a new volume of his autobiography, two plays—Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh (O’er All the Treetops Is Repose) and Am Ziel (The Goal Attained)—and Ave Vergil. Nineteen eighty-two saw the publication of the final volume of the autobiography and two novels, Concrete and the much-admired Wittgenstein’s Nephew, whose title alludes to Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew and which drew heavily on his actual friendship with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s cousin Paul.