Lagerkvist, Pär Fabian

Born May 23, 1891, in Växjö. Swedish writer; member of the Swedish Academy (1940).

Lagerkvist graduated from the University of Uppsala in 1912. In his youth he participated in the socialist movement. In 1912 he published the collection of novellas People. Lagerkvist’s early poetry and prose works revealed his interest in formalistic innovations. The collection of novellas Iron and Men (1915) and such expressionistic poems as “Anguish” (1916) and “Chaos” (1919) caught the pessimism engendered by World War I (1914–18).

The play The Eternal Smile (1920) and such expressionistic dramas as The Last Man (1917) and The Invisible One (1923) are characterized by the representation of reality as absurd and chaotic and an interest in the problem of evil as an abstract metaphysical principle, an essential element in Lagerkvist’s work. The realistic principle intensified in the satirical collection Evil Tales (1924) and in the autobiographical work Guest of Reality (1925).

Lagerkvist’s books of the 1930’s enunciated the necessity to fight fascism, which he considered the extreme manifestation of eternal evil—for example, the allegorical novella The Hangman (1933), the collection of essays The Clenched Fist (1934), the collection of satirical short stories At That Time (1935), the play The Man Without a Soul (1936), the poetry collection The Song and the Battle (1940), and Lagerkvist’s masterpiece, The Dwarf (1944).

In his postwar books, Lagerkvist related the problem of evil to man’s complicated moral yearning—for example, the collected poems The Evening Land (1953) and the plays and philosophical novels and novellas on biblical subjects. Barabbas (1950), The Sibyl (1956), and The Death of Ahasuerus (1960). He received the Nobel Prize in 1951.