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...

"The Visionary; or, Pictures from Nordland" (Den Fremsynte) was first published in English translation in 1894. A contemporary of both Ibsen and Bjornson, Lie first aspired to a seafaring life, but his eyesight made such a career impossible. He turned then to poetry and journalism, finally producing in 1870 this first novel, "a tragedy in which resistless Fate hurries its victims to destruction. The hero, David Holst, is one of those unhappy beings who seem doomed to a more than ordinary share of the ills of life. He has inherited from his mother at least a tendency to insanity, and he lives...