Summary
Considered one of Sweden's greatest 20th-century writers, Vilhelm Moberg created the characters Karl Oskar and Kristina Nilsson to portray the joys and tragedies of daily life for early Swedish immigrants in America. His consistently faithful depiction of these humble people's lives is a major strength of the Emigrant Novels.
Moberg's extensive research in the papers of Swedish emigrants in archival collections enabled him to incorporate many details of pioneer life. First published between 1949 and 1959 in Swedish, these four books were considered a single work by Moberg, who intended that they be read as documentary novels. These reprint editions contain introductions written by Roger McKnight of Gustavus Adolphus College, and they restore Moberg's bibliography not included in earlier English editions.
The first book in the series, The Emigrants introduces Karl Oskar and Kristina Nilsson, their three young children, and eleven others who make up a resolute party of Swedes fleeing the poverty, religious persecution, and social oppression of Småland in 1850.
The other books in the series-- Unto a Good Land (I), Unto a Good Land (II), and The Last Letter Home (IV)--are also available from the Minnesota Historical Society Press.
The Emigrants (1949) is the first volume of Moberg's internationally famous tetralogy describing the lives of Swedish emigrants in the nineteenth century. The Last Letter Home (1959) completes this psychologically penetrating and historically accurate treatment of Swedish settlement in Chisago County, Minnesota. Moberg's strident individualism and enduring empathy with the common people are also seen in A Time on Earth (1962), in which the old Swedish-American Albert Carlson assesses his life as death approaches. In Scandinavia, Moberg is famous as a historian and dramatist as well as a novelist. His History of the Swedish People (1970--71), of which two volumes were completed when he died in 1973, depicts in characteristically vivid language the life of the common folk---in sharp contrast to that of kings and nobility---throughout Sweden's history.
(Bowker Author Biography)
