Kristensen, Aage Tom

Born Aug. 4, 1893, in London. Danish writer.

Kristensen graduated from the University of Copenhagen in 1919. He published his first book of poetry, Dreams of a Freebooter, in 1920; a novel based on the life of Copenhagen slum dwellers, Life’s Arabesque in 1921; and a book of poetry, Miracles, reflecting his expressionistic impressions of the surrounding world, in 1922. The verse collection The Peacock Feather (1922), written in the impressionistic manner, was based upon a trip to China. The hero of the psychological novel Another (1923) is a little man seeking a way out of a state of inner emptiness. From 1924 to 1926 and again from 1932 to 1963, Kristensen was the leading literary critic of the newspaper Politiken. In his book A Cavalier in Spain (1926), Kristensen described what he had seen and experienced on a journey through Spain. In his novel Havoc (1930) the author showed the moral decline of a bourgeois intellectual who felt alienated from reality. Kristensen is the most significant representative of the “lost generation” in Danish literature. His anthology Between the Wars (1946) contains essays about J. Joyce, T. S. Eliot, E. Hemingway, and W. Faulkner, writers whose works Kristensen translated into Danish.