Henrik Pontoppidan

Henrik Pontoppidan (1857-1943), Danish novelist, born in Fredericia, and educated as an engineer at the Polytechnic Institute in Copenhagen. He worked as a journalist until he turned (circa 1880) to writing fiction. In his novels he was an accurate observer of social and political life among the Danish peasantry. He shared the 1917 Nobel Prize in literature with the Danish writer Karl Gjellerup. Pontoppidan's first novel cycle, Det Forjättede Land (1891-95), is about the life of a Danish clergyman; it includes Emanuel, or Children of the Soil (1896), The Promised Land (1896), and the untranslated Dommens Dag (Day of Judgment, 1895). His major work, the autobiographical Lykke-Per (Lucky Peter, 5 volumes, 1898-1904), reflects his dissatisfaction with his bourgeois Protestant upbringing. De Dödes Rige (Kingdom of the Dead, 5 volumes, 1912-16) describes the decade from 1900 to 1910 in Denmark.