Complete edition (Parts I to IV): I. Boyhood; II. Apprenticeship; III. The Great Struggle; IV. Daybreak. Martin Andersen Nexo (1869-1954) was born in the slums of Copenhagen into extreme poverty. He was the fourth of eleven children. His father, a stone mason, was an alcoholic and his mother was a daughter of a blacksmith. When he was eight, the family moved to the town of Nexo on the island of Bornholm, whose name he adopted in 1894 as his own. His breakthrough work, the Danish classic Pelle the Conqueror, appeared between 1906 (Part I) and 1910 (Part IV). It tells the story of Pelle, a poor...

A long, rich work in three volumes, full of poetic detail, this novel interprets a working womans life. In the first volume of the trilogy, Ditte is a girl alive to all the bittersweet experiences of life in a poor family struggling for survival.