Josef Kjellgren

Born Nov. 13, 1907, in Mörkö, Södermanland; died Apr. 8,1948, in Stockholm. Swedish writer.

Kjellgren first published his writings in workers’ newspapers beginning in the second half of the 1920’s. He joined the Swedish division of Clarté in 1928. Kjellgren used social motifs in his very first poetry collection, The Light of the Beacon (1931). He condemned fascism in the poetry collection The West (1933), the short-story collection Gunshot Hole at the Waterline (1936), and the play The Unknown Swedish Soldier (1938). Kjellgren developed the theme of international worker solidarity in the travel notes Across Europe Without a Penny in My Pocket (1930) and the collection of poems and essays On the Banks of the Thames (1937).

Kjellgren wrote “novels of the collective,” for example, People Around the Bridge (1935; Russian translation, 1938) and the trilogy consisting of The Emerald (1939), The Gold Chain (1940), and Men’s Friendship (1947). In People Around the Bridge he depicted the working class in the style of socialist realism and used a Communist as his hero. Kjellgren also wrote children’s books. Many of his works reveal elements of expressionism.