Summary
"The fullest, finest, and most powerful novel that has been written about pioneer life in America."--The Nation
O. E. Rolvaag's classic novel of a family of Norwegian settlers in the Great Plains--a vivid and intimate portrait of the nineteenth-century immigrant experience and the exploration of America
Based in part on Ole Edvart Rølvaag's own recollections as well of those of his wife's family who were immigrant homesteaders, Giants in the Earth is the riveting story of a Norwegian family forging a new life amid the harsh, desolate climate of the Dakota Territory. Rølvaag recounts the hardships they endured on the high prairie--blizzards, locust storms, poverty, hunger, loneliness, homesickness, and culture shock--as well as their simple joys, culminating in a magnificent epic that bridges Norwegian culture and the history of the American dream.
"A moving narrative of pioneer hardship and heroism. . . . The background of the boundless Dakota prairie, with its mysterious distances and its capacity for evil, is painted with alternating beauty and grimness." --The Atlantic
Norwegian-born Rolvaag emigrated to the United States at age 20 in 1896. Following a college education in Minnesota and Norway, he began the writing and teaching career (at St. Olaf College, Minnesota) that was to bring him fame as an interpreter of the Norwegian-American cultural experience. Rolvaag's understanding of immigrant life on the prairie was the source of novels that have given his name a solid place in both national literatures. His first, highly autobiographical work, The Third Life of Per Smevik (1912), was published under the pseudonym Paal Morck. Rolvaag's masterpiece, Giants in the Earth (1924--25), is his own translation, with Lincoln Colcord, of the first two of four novels dealing with the family of Per Hansa. Peder Victorious (1928) and Their Fathers' God (1931) complete the epic, although these two novels are less compelling.
