Landsbybilleder (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1883)includes “En Fiskerrede,” translated (from an earlier magazine version) by Julianne Sarauw as “A Fisher Nest” in American-Scandinavian Review, 15 (1927): 476–486;

Ung Elskov: Idyl (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1885); revised as Ung Elskov: Blade of en Mindekrans (Copenhagen: Schubothe, 1906);

Mimoser: Et Familjeliv (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1886); translated by Gordius Nielsen as The Apothecary’s Daughters (London: Trübner, 1890);

Fra Ilytterne: Nye Landsbybilleder (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1887; Minneapolis: C. Rasmussen, 1888);

Isbjørnen: Et Portræt (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1887); translated by James Massengale as The Polar Bear; A Portrait, Wisconsin Introductions to Scandinavia II, no. 12 (Madison: Department of Scandinavian Studies, University of Wisconsin, 2003);

spøgelser: En Historie (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1888), Folkelivsskildringer, volume 1 (Copenhagen: P. Hauberg, 1888); volume 2 (Copenhagen: Nyt dansk Forlagskonsortium, 1890);

Krøniker (Copenhagen: P. G. Philipsen, 1890);

Natur: T smaa Romaner, 2 volumes (Copenhagen: Schubothe, 1890)–comprises Vildt and En Bonde;

Reisebilder aus Dänemark (Copenhagen: Host & Son, 1890);

Skyer: Skildringer fra Provisoriernes Dage (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1890)–includes “Illum Galgebakke.

En Prolog, “translated by David Stoner as “Gallows Hill at Ilum” in Anthology of Danish Literature, edited by Frederik J. Billeskov Jansen and P. M. Mitchell (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), pp. 333–359;

Muld: Et Tidsbillede (Copenhagen: P. G. Philipsen, 1891); translated by Alice Lucas as Emanuel; or, Children of the Soil (London: Dent, 1896);

Det forjættede Land: Et Tidsbillede (Copenhagen: P. G. Philipsen, 1892); translated by Lucas as The Promised Land (London: Dent, 1896);

Minder (Copenhagen: P. G. Philipsen, 1893);

Den gamle Adam. Skildring fra Alfarvej (Copenhagen: P. G. Philipsen, 1894);

Nattevagt (Copenhagen: P. G. Philipsen, 1894);

Dommens Dag: Et Tidsbillede (Copenhagen: P. G. Philipsen, 1895);

Højsang: Skildring fra Alfarvej (Copenhagen: Schubothe, 1896);

Kirkeskuden: En Forælling, second edition (Copenhagen: Schubothe, 1897);

Det forjættede Land (Copenhagen: Nordiske Forlag, 1898; revised edition, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1918)–comprises Muld, Det forjættede Land, and Dommens Dag;

Lykke-Per: Hans Ungdom (Copenhagen: Nordiske Forlag, 1898);

Lykke-Per finder Skatten (Copenhagen: Nordiske Forlag, 1898);

Forællinger, 2 volumes (Copenhagen: Nordiske Forlag, 1899)–includes “Ørneflugt,” translated by Lida Siboni Hanson as “Eagle’s Flight” in American-Scandinavian Review, 17 (1929): 556–558;

Lykke-Per: Hans Kærlighed (Copenhagen: Nordiske Forlag, 1899);

Lykke-Per i det Fremmede (Copenhagen: Nordiske Forlag, 1899);

Det ideale Hjam (Aarhus: Jydsk Forlags-Forretning, 1900);

Lille Rødhætte: Et Portræt (Copenhagen: Nordiske Forlag, 1900); republished as Thora van Deken in Noveller og Skitser: Et Udvalg, volume 2 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1922), pp. 269–352;

Lykke-Per: Hans store Værk (Copenhagen: Nordiske Forlag, 1901);

Lykke-Per og hans Kæreste (Copenhagen: Nordiske Forlag, 1902);

De vilde Fugle: Et Skuespil (Copenhagen: Nordiske Forlag, 1902);

Lykke-Per: Hans Rejse til Amerika (Copenhagen: Nordiske Forlag, 1903);

Et Endeligt: En Landsbyhistorie (Copenhagen: Schubothe, 1904);

Lykke-Per: Hans sidste Kamp (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1904);

Borgmester Hoeck og Hustru: Et Dobbeltportræt (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1905) ; translated by Martin A. David as Burgomaster Hoeck and His Wife, with an introduction by Flemming Behrendt, bilingual edition (Lysaker: Geelmuyden.Kiese/Scandinavian Airlines, 1999);

Lykke-Per, collected and revised edition, 3 volumes (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1905; revised, 2 volumes, 1918)–comprises Lykke-Per: Hans Ungdom, Lykke-Per finder Skatten, Lykke-Per: Hans Kærlighed, Lykke-Per i det Fremmede, Lykke-Per: Hans store Værk, Lykke-Per og hans Kæreste, Lykke-Per: Hans Rejse til Amerika, and Lykke-Per: Hans sidste Kamp;

Asgaardsrejen: Et Skuespil (Copenhagen: Schubothe, 1906); revised as Asgaardsrejen: Et Forspil (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1928);

Hans Kvast og Melusine (Copenhagen: Schubothe, 1907);

Det store Spøgelse (Copenhagen: Schubothe, 1907);

Den kongelige Gæst (Copenhagen: Schubothe, 1908); translated by Hanson (from 1902 periodical version) as “The Royal Guest” in Denmark’s Best Stories: An Introduction to Danish Fiction, edited by Hanna Astrup Larsen (New York: AmericanScandinavian Foundation/Norton, 1928), pp. 217–236;

Torben og Jytte, En Fortælling-Kres, no. 1 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1912);

Storeholt, En Fortælling-Kres, no. 2 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1913);

Kirken og dens Mænd: Et Foredrag (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1914);

Toldere og Syndere, En Fortælling-Kres, no. 3 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1914);

Enslevs Død, En Fortælling-Kres, no. 4 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1915);

Favsingholm, En Fortælling-Kres, no. 5 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1916);

De Dødes Rige, 2 volumes (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1917)–comprises Torben og Jytte, Storeholt, Toldere og Syndere, Enslevs Død, and Faysingholm;

Et Kærlighedseventyr (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1918);

En Vinterrejse: Nogle Dagbogsblade (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1920);

Mands Himmerig (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1927);

Drengeaar (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1933);

Hamskifte (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1936);

Aru og Gæld (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1938);

Familjeliv (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1940);

Undervejs til mig selv. Et Tilbageblik (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1943)–abridgment of Drengeaar, Hamskifte, Aru og Gæld, and Faminljeliv.

Editions and Collections: Noveller og Skitser: Et Udvalg, 3 volumes (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1922-1930);

Ilum Galgebakke; Den første Gendarm; Nattevagt, edited by Vilhelm Øhlenschläger (Copenhagen: Gyldendal/Dansklærerforeningen, 1926);

Isbjørnen: Et Portræt, edited by Svend Norrild (Copenhagen: Gyldendal/Dansklærerforeningen, 1941);

Det forjættede Land: Forkortet Udgave, edited and abridged by Aage Bertelsen (Copenhagen: Dansklærerforeningen, 1943);

Fra Hytterne, edited by Johannes P. Olsen (Copenhagen: Gyldendal/Dansklærerforeningen, 1953);

Mands Himmerig, edited by Esther Skjerbæk and Thorkild Skjerbæk (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1961);

Borgmester Hoeck og Hustru, edited by Frederik Nielsen (Copenhagen: Gyldendal/Dansklærerforeningen, 1964);

Lykke-Per, edited, with an afterword, by Thorkild Skjerbæk, 2 volumes (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1964);

Ung Elskov og andre Fortællinger, edited by Thorkild Skjerbæk (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1965);

Fra Hytterne: Skyggerids fra Landsbyen, edited by Esther Skjerbæk and Thorkild Skjerbæk (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1973);

Det forjættede Land, edited by Thorkild Skjerbæk, 3 volumes (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1979);

Magister Globs Papirer, edited by Thorkild Skjerbæk (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1979)–comprises Minder, Den gamle Adam, and Højsang;

Mimoser: Et Familjeliv, afterword by Birgitte Hesselaa (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1979);

Skyer, edited by Thorkild Skjerbæk (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1979) ;

Ørneflugt og andre Krøniker, edited by Thorkild Skjerbæk (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1979)–comprises Kroniker and Den kongelige Gæst;

De Dødes Rige, 2 volumes, edited by Thorkild Skjerbæk (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1982);

En Vinterrejse, afterword by Flemming Behrendt (Copenhagen: C. Andersen, 1982);

Det ideale Hjem, with essay by Poul Behrendt (Copenhagen: Amadeus, 1986);

Kronjyder og Molboer, afterword by Thorkild Skjerbæk (Randers: Randers Antikvariat, 1989);

Enetaler, edited by Johan de Mylius (Copenhagen: Aschehoug, 1993);

Henrik Pontoppidan, mellem Andegård og Ørnehjem, edited by Jorn Orum Hansen (Herning: Systime, 1994);

Meninger & Holdninger: Af Urbanus’ Dagbog, edited by Erik H. Madsen (Højbjerg: Hovedland, 1994);

Det forjættede Land, 2 volumes, edited by Esther Kielberg and Lars Peter Romhild (Copenhagen: Gyldendal/Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, 1997);

Henrik Pontoppidans Digte, edited by Borge Andersen (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1999);

Smaa Romaner, 1885-1890, edited by Flemming Behrendt (Copenhagen: Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab / Valby: Borgen, 1999)–comprises Ung elskov, Mimoser, Isbjørnen, Spøgelser, and Natur;

Smaa Romaner, 1893-1900, edited by Flemming Behrendt (Copenhagen: Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab / Valby: Borgen, 2004)–comprises Minder, Nattevagt, Den gamle Adam, Højsang, Lille Rodhætte, and Det ideale Hjem.

PLAY PRODUCTIONS: Asgaardsrejen, Odense, Odense Teater, 30 November 1906; revised, Copenhagen, Folketeatret, 26 January 1907; revised as Ragna, Copenhagen, Folketeatret, 20 November 1991;

Thora van Deken, by Pontoppidan and Hjalmar Bergman, Copenhagen, Dagmarteatret, 26 March 1914.

PRODUCED SCRIPTS: De vilde Fugle, Danmarks Radio, 20 August 1932;

Thora van Deken, by Pontoppidan and Hjalmar Bergman, Danmarks Radio, 18 December 1962.

In his brief autobiographical statement for the Nobel Foundation, written after sharing the Nobel Prize in Literature with Karl Gjellerup in 1917, Henrik Pontoppidan called his three great novel sequences–Det for- jættede Land (1892-1895, The Promised Land), Lykke-Per (1898-1904, Lucky Per), and De Dødes Rige (1912-1916, The Realm of the Dead)–“et sammenhængende Billede of Nutidens Danmark” (a comprehensive picture of contemporary Denmark). Pontoppidan’s literary body of work, one of the most voluminous and extensive in Danish literature, consists of fifty titles written over a period of more than sixty years. He lived all over Denmark, and his writings reflect his familiarity with both the Danish people and their environs. Ideologically, Pontoppidan’s work reflects the new industrial era as well as the old parochial society. As a literary figure, he was both a rationalist and a Romantic, a symbolist and a linguistic puritan, a fashionable dandy and a simple wayfarer carrying only a knapsack and pen.

Henrik Pontoppidan was born on 24 July 1857 to Dines Pontoppidan and Marie Oxenbøl Pontoppidan. His father, a literate, serious, and somewhat bitter man, was at this time a minister in Fredericia. His mother had a brilliant mind, but giving birth to sixteen children weakened her health. In the summer of 1863 the family moved to Randers, where the father hoped for a richer parish. The family finances remained strained, however, because of Dines Pontoppidan’s duty to fund the pension of his predecessor. Throughout his life, Henrik Pontoppidan also suffered tight financial constraints. Even the Nobel Prize money he received was reduced by a bank failure in 1927. Randers became Pontoppidan’s paradise on earth, particularly in his memoirs and his literary works. The Prussian occupation of Jutland from April to November 1864 made an early impression on him that did not diminish during his adult life. While his three older brothers grew up in the optimistic rush of victory after the war with Prussia (1848 to 1850) over Schleswig-Holstein, Pontoppidan, along with many of his peers, was marked for life by the Danish defeat of 1864 in the second war with Prussia.

When Pontoppidan turned fifteen, he was visiting the island of Bogø in southern Denmark, where his grandfather had served as the parish pastor. An older cousin took him up to the highest spot on the island and pointed across the water toward the many church spires dotting the Danish landscape. For the previous 350 years in the surrounding Danish parishes, either the pastor or his wife had belonged to the Pontoppidan family. Later in life, Pontoppidan described this experience in one of his autobiographical works, Drengeaar (1933, Boyhood Years); the view of the spires made him understand that he was a sort of heir to the realm. He was descended from a long line of pastors, but he never became a clergyman himself; instead, he viewed his native Denmark as his parish.

In the early 1870s, after returning home from his visit to Bogo, Pontoppidan founded a literary group in Randers consisting of five schoolmates. The group met once a week to discuss their favorite authors, present new ideas, drink, and smoke. Outside of school, Pontoppidan led an active outdoor life: he swam and sailed in the fjord and hiked with friends, particularly north to the ocean and west to the moors and the world of his favorite author, Steen Steensen Blicher. A broadchested, robust boy with a dark complexion, Pontoppidan was strikingly handsome, with sparkling blue eyes. He matured quickly, although he was not tall (five feet, nine inches, according to his military-service record), and he was enthusiastic on the dance floor and popular with the girls. His academic forte lay in mathematics and physics, and his father would have liked to see him become a merchant’s apprentice to the childless uncle who took the boy and his cousin to Bogo. Instead, a beloved mathematics teacher helped Pontoppidan to realize his desire to become an engineer.

In the fall of 1873 Pontoppidan arrived ahead of his schoolmates in Copenhagen, where his three elder brothers already resided. Although he formed close ties with his brother Morten, his relationship to his two other brothers remained distant. After his preparatory mathematics examination, Pontoppidan was accepted in the fall semester of 1874 to the Polytechnical Institute of Denmark (later renamed the Technical University of Denmark), founded by the physicist Hans Christian Ørsted, which at that time lay in the heart of old Copenhagen. After 1875 Pontoppidan lived in the old residential quarter known as Nyboder; its village atmosphere made him feel more at home than the suburban neighborhood of Nørrebro, where he had begun his life in the capital city. He remained an outdoor person, always out trekking, and he later chose remote residences in the provinces not only because of tight finances but also because social isolation became a precondition for his writing.

In the spring of 1876, as an engineering student, Pontoppidan applied to take part in a geological expedition to Greenland. In a single sitting he plowed through Hinrich Rink’s two-volume work on Greenland and its people, Grønland, geographisk og statistisk beskrevet (1852, 1857, Greenland, Geographically and Statistically Described). Another student, however, was chosen for the trip. Using an inheritance from his grandfather, Pontoppidan dulled his disappointment with a trip to Switzerland. He experienced the Alps firsthand and became acquainted with mortal fear during a mountain climb. When he returned home (following a romance with a Swiss milkmaid), he threw himself into reading another descriptive work, Hermann Alexander von Berlepsch’s Die Alpen (1861, The Alps; translated into Danish as Alperne, 1873). Thus equipped with both firsthand and secondhand knowledge, Pontoppidan set out the following winter to write a drama drawn from his experiences, which he titled, typically for the times, “Hjemvee” (Nostalgia). At the beginning of March 1879 he sent an entirely rewritten piece to the Danish Royal Theater and received an encouraging rejection. Returning home from his father’s funeral in June of the same year, he showed his brother Morten the manuscript. The manuscript was later burned, but, according to Pontoppidan’s own statement in Hamskifte (1936, Sloughing the Skin), it must have been “temmelig noje kalkeret” (a rather precise painting) of his experiences in Switzerland. Despite his father’s death Pontoppidan took the final examination in December 1879 but failed a major subject, hydraulics. According to contemporary statements, he could easily have taken the examination again and passed, but he did not avail himself of that option.

Pontoppidan’s first story, “Kirkeskuden” (The Votive Ship), was finished in a first version in 1879. At their mother’s request, Morten Pontoppidan offered his brother a job as a teacher at his folkehøjskole (folk high school) in northern Zealand beginning in February 1880. At the school Henrik Pontoppidan met Mette Marie Hansen, a farmer’s daughter almost two years his elder, who was employed at his brother’s house. They were engaged in the spring of 1881. During the summer of 1881 “Kirkeskuden” was rewritten and took on the stylistic color of the recently published novel Arbejdsfolk (1881, Working People) by Norwegian author Alexander Kielland. In “Kirkeskuden,” a lively tale that includes the germs of a surprising number of Pontoppidan’s later writings, an adolescent boy is placed in the care of a pale minister and his wife. He rebels against the couple by attempting to launch a votive ship from the church (such model ships were often displayed in churches, among other things, to serve as a symbol for the Christian Church as a safe ship on the sea of the world). The ship immediately sinks, and the boy then runs off to sea. In this text sarcasm and satire are blended with the lyrical and the grotesque, particularly in the raw description of the pastor’s death. Pontoppidan and Hansen were married in December 1881 on the royalties of his debut book, Stækkede Vinger (1881, Clipped Wings), which included “Kirkeskuden.” The couple honeymooned in northern Italy.

In addition to “Kirkeskuden,” which takes up two-thirds of the book, Stækkede Vinger also includes the story “Et Endeligt” (The End of a Life), first published in September 1881 in the literary periodical Ude og Hjemme (Abroad and at Home), and two short sarcastic sketches taken from Copenhagen society. Stækkede Vinger is neither a homogenous nor a particularly wellcomposed book. Whereas “Kirkeskuden” had its origin in student social excursions to the Roskilde Fjord, “Et Endeligt” was Pontoppidan’s first work about the rural proletariat. The editor of Ude og Hjemme, Otto Borchsenius, became his mentor. When a split developed between the “Danish” and the “European” factions of the Venstre (Liberal) political party, Borchsenius became the literary editor of the politically moderate newspaper Morgenbladet. In both periodicals he helped Pontoppidan along the path of his literary career, partly by accepting his contributions, often written under the pseudonym “Rusticus,” and partly by reviewing his works, not uncritically and sometimes unfairly. The two severed ties in 1887.

After a satirical description of the folkehøjskole milieu in Sandinge Menighed (1883, Sandinge Parish), Pontoppidan published his first “Skyggerids fra Landsbyen” (Silhouettes of the Village) in Landsbybilleder (1883, Village Sketches). Late in 1884, along with his wife and two children, he moved to his in-laws’ village, Østby, in Horns Herred. His elder daughter died in March 1885 of tubercular meningitis, which developed in the miserable and unhealthy conditions to which he had consigned his family. Meanwhile, Pontoppidan worked in a comfortable room at his sister-in-law’s house on one of the larger farms in the village. In some of his writings he drew too closely upon local material, such as in “Naadsensbrød” (Alms), which was included in his next story collection, Fra Hytterne (1887, From the Huts). With empathy or sarcasm he described in recognizable detail the misery and exploitation in the small, class-divided society of the village. The villagers might have tolerated this intrusion if Pontoppidan had run as a candidate for parliament and championed politically the views he had aired in his short stories. He did not take this path, however, always remaining an independent observer.

In addition to writing short stories, Pontoppidan developed a genre of his own, the “smaa Romaner” (short novels). The first one, Ung Elskov (1885, Young Love), is set outside the village, in closer contact with spellbinding nature. A girl is seduced and then abandoned by a Copenhagen student; instead of putting up with her local fiancé, she commits suicide. Pontoppidan also threw himself into several experiments with genre; with the short novel Mimoser: Et Familjeliv (1886, Mimosas: A Family Life; translated as The Apothecary’s Daughters, 1890) he discovered how easy it was to play games with the bourgeoisie. The book was acclaimed by both sides of the so-called feminist debate, but the author himself refused, as always, to take sides.

A doctor’s persistent advice to move the family to healthier quarters persuaded Pontoppidan in the summer of 1886 to rent a large, abandoned manager’s residence at an old paper factory on the coast of northern Zealand in Havreholm, south of Hornbæk. Here he could sit in the tower room and remain undisturbed while the family went about its business in the many half-empty rooms below. Pontoppidan’s feelings for his wife are known only from a single statement in a letter dated a year after his daughter’s death in 1885, prior to their final departure from Østby. At that point, his wife was pregnant with their third child, a son. Pontoppidan wrote, “Jo ældre jeg bliver, des dårligere kan jeg undvære hende. Skulde nogen nogensinde skrive min Biografi, måtte hun deri indtage den fornemste Plads” (The older I get, the more I feel I cannot do without her. If anyone ever writes my biography, she must assume the most distinguished place).

In the summer of 1887, however, at the seaside resort of Blokhus in northern Jutland, Pontoppidan met Antoinette Kofoed, five years his junior and the daughter of the widow of a ranking official in the Ministry of Justice. Later, in his old age, he described his encounter with Kofoed on a tennis court as an attraction he had tried to fight. He had already provided a convincing description of the agonies of an unfaithful husband in Mimoser. In the summer of 1888 his wife moved with the children from Havreholm. The couple was unable to work through the crisis of his encounter with Kofoed, and the marriage failed. Only then, according to Pontoppidan in his old age, did he renew his connection with Kofoed.

In Ung Elskov, Spøgelser: En Historie (1888, Ghosts: A History), and Vildt (1890, Wild Game), stories of unhappy, hard-won, and unrequited love, respectively, unfold in a spellbinding and reflective way. Isbjørnen: Et Portræt (1887; translated as The Polar Bear: A Portrait, 2003), set in Greenland, a place Pontoppidan never visited, explores the character of the priestly rebel that became so dear to his authorial spirit: pure of heart, rough in manner, and world-weary.

Nature plays an ambiguous role as both seducer and redeemer in Pontoppidan’s writings. This tradition recalls the German Romanticism of Ludwig Tieck’s “Der blonde Eckbert” (1797). One can also trace a melancholy from the Jutland moors, reminiscent of the work of Blicher, which unites a fairy-tale atmosphere with the earthy power of popular speech–unlike the city life of Copenhagen, with which the provincial boy from Randers was never reconciled. At the same time, however, Pontoppidan was academically schooled enough to realize how easily this natural connection could short-circuit. Not until late in his writing, in Lykke-Per, did he achieve mastery of nature as a religious mirror of the human soul and its labyrinths.

Pontoppidan’s journalism at first consisted primarily of literary adaptations of impressions and ideas. After becoming connected to the newspaper Politiken in the summer of 1887 and then obtaining a job on the daily Kjøbenhavns Børs-Tidende (Copenhagen’s Exchange-News) in August 1889, his writing acquired a more columnist-like character, although there were also reviews and literary texts among his contributions (among them, a draft version of Vildt).

Not until March 1884 did a personal relationship develop between Pontoppidan and the influential literary critic Georg Brandes, and even then Brandes did not become a successor to Borchsenius as a literary guide or adviser. On the contrary, he never expressed much of an opinion on Pontoppidan’s writings, nor did he try to broaden European acquaintance with the younger writer’s works. In his correspondence Brandes expressed a solidarity that was never reciprocated with the same warmth from Pontoppidan. In his autobiographical volume Arv og Gæld (1938, Inheritance and Debt) Pontoppidan characterizes his relationship with Brandes as a fleeting acquaintance, expressing thereby its volatile character. Ideologically, Pontoppidan was closer to Brandes and his school of thought, which eventually came to be called Brandesianism, than to any other movement. Pontoppidan’s personal goals, however, were higher, and, for better or for worse, his anchoring in the clerical milieu was quite alien to Brandes, who never really understood Pontoppidan’s major novels, a fact that is evident in the one article Brandes wrote on Pontoppidan’s works.

In April 1889 Pontoppidan and his wife officially separated. During the waiting period before he could marry Kofoed, he participated in Copenhagen’s literary café life, to which August Strindberg, Edvard Brandes (Georg Brandes’s younger brother), Peter Nansen, and Johannes Jorgensen also belonged, as well as the artists associated with Pontoppidan’s friend Johan Rohde. Pontoppidan also became acquainted with the poet Holger Drachmann and developed a deep love-hate relationship with him with regard to literary tastes. Pontoppidan displayed a more politically oriented irony and satire in his next collection of short stories, Skyer (1890, Clouds), Georg Brandes’s favorite among his early books. These stories, which flay the injustices of the conservative political party Højre (Right) and the lack of political will on the part of ordinary Venstre members, were written during the period of “provisional government” from 1885, when the Højre Party governed without a parliamentary basis.

In April 1892, when his divorce was finally granted, Pontoppidan married Kofoed. The couple had two children, a daughter in 1894 and a son in 1896. For many years Pontoppidan had to provide for two families, a strain that did not improve his financial situation. Both his sons immigrated (in 1905 and 1920, respectively) to the Americas: one to the United States and the other to Brazil. Neither ever returned, except for brief visits. As a father Pontoppidan was supposedly distant, not unlike his own description of the character Lykke-Per as a father. Kofoed was called “refined and sensitive” by one of the servants. Afflicted with weak health, Kofoed suffered from more than one disease, which often kept her in bed or hospitalized until her death in 1928. She was, however, a strong support for her husband in the many dark days that followed. In the poem “Sølvbruden” (The Silver Wedding Bride), Pontoppidan wrote, “Din Fryd blev min, / min Sorg blev din, / og fælles var vor Lykke” (Your joy became mine / my sorrow thine, / and united our common happiness). The literary critic Vilhelm Andersen, a close friend of the couple, wrote in his Henrik Pontoppidan: Et nydansk Forfatterskab (1917, Henrik Pontoppidan: A Modern Danish Authorship) that Kofoed had “fuldt saa megen Indflydelse paa ‘Stilen’ i hans Personlighed som Goldschmidt paa den i hans Romaner og Noveller” (just as much influence on the “style” of his personality as [Meïr] Goldschmidt on that of his novels and short stories).

Pontoppidan’s plan for his first major novel was to recall his village days. At the close of 1883 he had promised his publisher “Et stort, bredt og lyst Billede fra Landet” (a big, broad, and lighthearted picture of the country). Pontoppidan wrote that the main theme would be the breach between the followers of N. F. S. Grundtvig and the disciples of the Indre Mission (Home Mission), an evangelical sect within the Lutheran Church, between the light and the dark. The novel would also provide a vivid, painterly view of something that did not exist in Danish literature: the large popular assemblies, church meetings, election meetings, Christmas parties, and other aspects of village life with which Pontoppidan was intimately familiar. Ultimately, the novel, planned for two volumes, came to be written in Copenhagen and changed character. Although it remained large, Pontoppidan concentrated on one main character, Pastor Emanuel Hansted, and presented an ever darkening vision of illusion and defeat. Muld (1891, Soil; translated as Emanuel; or, Children of the Soil, 1896) was the result of approximately five years of writing.

In Det forjættede Land (1892; translated as The Promised Land, 1896), conceived and cast as a novel about a Tolstoyan idealist, Hansted is forced to resign himself to defeat in his attempt to unite his urban background with the apparently pastoral idyll with which he had fallen in love. Religious contradictions surface in the character of the weaver Hansen, a demonic seducer who undermines Hansted’s illusions. The political and religious themes surface in Hansted’s personal split between two women: his wife, Hansigne, from a small village, and Ragnhild, a deacon’s daughter with the same cultural background as Hansted. He gives up, leaves his wife, and, together with his children, returns to the capital city.

The year after completing the second volume of the novel sequence, Pontoppidan picked up the thread and wrote a third volume, titled Dommens Dag (1895, Judgment Day), in which he places Hansted in the folkehøjskole environment he had already described in Sandinge Menighed. In the midst of far-reaching theological, cultural, and political discussions, Hansted follows his destiny into religious madness, sending him definitively into the abyss as a dreamer. The book ends with his death. This development was not a clear extension of the first two volumes and presupposed a revision of them. With some reluctance, Pontoppidan undertook this rewriting and in 1898 published an edition of the trilogy under the title Det forjættede Land, a version that itself proved not to be definitive.

During and after the lengthy composition of Det forjættede Land, Pontoppidan published a series of smaller books. Some of them were a reworking of older material. The collection Krøniker (1890, Chronicles) includes short, pointed descriptions, written in an archaic–sometimes fairy-tale- or fable-like–style, which profited from Pontoppidan’s deep familiarity with the language of the Bible and Danish myths. The majority of these pieces had been published, under Pontoppidan’s Copenhagen pseudonym Urbanus, in the columns of Kjøbenhavns Børs-Tidende from September to November 1889. One of the new selections is “De Vises Sten” (The Philosopher’s Stone), in which a King Lear figure, blinded and banished, teaches a downy-cheeked lad that the philosopher’s stone is “a deep, silent contempt for humanity.” The most bitter text in this little book, “De Vises Sten” lacks the humor that characterizes the other stories. Together with a text from 1889, “Landsbyens Dronning” (Queen of the Village), “De Vises Sten” indicates that Pontoppidan had begun to read–or at least become acquainted with–the ideas of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In August 1889 Georg Brandes published his lectures on Nietzsche, and, like many of his Danish contemporaries, Pontoppidan derived an important impetus from them.

Vildt, one of the two short novels in Natur (1890), published immediately after Krøniker, represents Pontoppidan’s initial attempt at first-person narrative in a longer format. Both books were published while he was in Berlin, where he went on his first trip to the south since his honeymoon, thanks to a much-sought-after privately funded Ancker travel grant, which he received after years of application. The grant money remained at home to support the family, and Pontoppidan cooped himself up in Berlin on an advance to continue writing Muld. Neither at this time nor later did he fulfill his dream, encouraged by Georg Brandes, of traveling to Paris. Pontoppidan never reached France or England.

Minder (1893, Memories) involves a recasting of older material. The result is an original elegy upon the first-person narrator’s first love, experienced early in puberty, and it unfolds in a nostalgic description of the environs, almost perfectly matching the author’s childhood home and surrounding vicinity.

Pontoppidan’s most famous chronicle, “Ørneflugt” (translated as “Eagle’s Flight,” 1929), was completed in 1893, published in a periodical in 1894, and appeared later in a new edition of Krøniker in volume one of Fortællinger (1899, Tales). Apparently written as an inversion of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “Den grimme Ælling” (1843, The Ugly Duckling), it tells of Klaus, an eagle who grew up with “clipped wings” on a pastor’s duck farm. After the pastor’s death, the eagle has the chance to spread his wings into the icy wilderness of the Nietzschean mountaintops. A female eagle lures the clumsy Klaus so far away from home that he changes his mind and returns home alone, only to be shot down by a farmer as a common chicken thief and to end on the dung heap, “For det hjælper alligevel ikke, at man har ligget i et Ørnexg, nár man er voxet op i Andegården” (For it is no use to come from the egg of an eagle, if one has grown up on a duck farm). The text may also be interpreted as a grim parody of the classic paradigm of the bildungsroman and the protagonist’s movement from home to homelessness and then back home.

Nattevagt (1894, Night Watch), another widely read work by Pontoppidan, became part of the canon for teachers of Danish literature. The novel takes place in a Danish colony in Rome a few years before the time when Pontoppidan himself spent his yearlong honeymoon with Kofoed in that city. His first “artist novel,” part of Nattevagt consists of theoretical discussions between the protagonist, the painter Jorgen Hallager–a revolutionary anarchist of the social-realist school who has just married Ursula, the daughter of a patrician family–and his good friend and colleague Thorkild Drehling, who has been taken by the new sensitivity and symbolic tendencies of the times. The book includes Hallager’s furious rant against the times. His final line became a familiar quotation: “Hold Galden flydende!” (Keep the wound open!). Even his name–a homonym of halvt’-ager (half-acre)–indicates that he represents only one side of the truth. Whereas Hallager intones the views of Pontoppidan’s literary journalism, Drehling, for his part, repeats statements from Spøgelser that were interpreted as Pontoppidan’s first signal of a reorientation in his writings from social to personal exploration: leg véd, at man i Livet kan mode Sorger og Skuffelser, der nager langt værre end baade Sult og Kulde” (I know that, in life, one may meet sorrows and disappointments that plague one longer than either hunger or cold).

One chronicle that did not go into Krøniker but had been published that same year, 1890, under Pontoppidan’s usual pseudonym of Urbanus in Kjøbenhayns Børs-Tidende was “Den gamle Adam” (The Old Adam), in which a randy Adam asks the Lord to create women for him from all his ribs. Together with his book review of Viggo Stuckenberg’s novel Messias (1889, The Messiah), “Den gamle Adam” resulted in a lawsuit against the newspaper. The editor of the paper, Georg Brandes’s brother Ernst, was held liable for the book review, and Pontoppidan lost his state support for a year.

Less accomplished than Minder is Den gamle Adam (1894), consisting of the title work and various shorter pieces, including a brief, almost aphoristic text, a “Diary” from Kjøbenhavns Børs-Tidende. Like the circus girl Elvira Madigan and the Swedish count who fell madly in love and committed suicide in 1889 on Funen’s southern island of Tåsinge, the vacationing older deputy judge in Den gamle Adam falls for a girl, and it costs him his wife and children. Not the judge, however, but a young secondary character commits suicide over unhappy love at the end of the book. In all of these works the first-person narrator takes on increasingly individual features. He is most strongly realized in Højsang (1896, Hymn). Like the narrator in Vildt, the philologist in Højsang is a rutting swain who imagines having his sexual debut with an older, married, and apparently neglected woman. In this instance the philology student has absorbed a great deal of literature in his years of study and, therefore, clothes his desire in spiritual garb.

While the narrators in Vildt and Den gamle Adam are contemporaneous with their setting, the narrators of both Minder and Højsang, the same age as their author, look back at an earlier time. In all four short novels, Pontoppidan uses these implicit elements to create ironic distance and satirical mockery, so that readers themselves are allowed to draw their own conclusions about where the “truth” of the characters–in particular, of the narrator himself–lies. Thus, the omniscient narrator who governs the major novels is suspended in many of the shorter ones for a more elegant epic game. At the time, literary critics had a difficult time understanding this game and often believed that Pontoppidan could be taken “at his word.” For example, a single sentence from the parody “Preface” in Højsang was taken out of context to characterize the author as one who “above all loves clarity of thought and masculine mental composure.” Pontoppidan did not object to this statement; from this time, he created a public mask behind which he could make his artistic faces.

Pontoppidan then turned to his next great novel, Lykke-Per, published in eight volumes from 1898 to 1904 and collected in 1905. Once again, he used his own life as a starting point; yet, one can understand nothing if one reads the novel only as autobiography. Scholars continue to discuss the extent to which Pontoppidan knew how the course of this novel would run and how it would end. Some have seen “Ørneflugt” as the model. Peter Andreas “Per” Sidenius, son of a minister, wants to be an engineer and a modern man. He strives to surpass the limits of the environment ruthlessly to conquer the world, including Jakobe, the daughter of a wealthy Jew named Salomon. Per creates a grandiose plan for a canal system to connect the poorer parts of the country, proposes a port at the west coast of Jutland, and invents machines to collect ocean-wave energy. But when Jakobe draws him up to the thin air of freedom and demands that he choose the end over the means to finance his projects, he loses courage and flees back to Christianity and the comfortable embrace of the Danish provinces. Per then marries Inger, the daughter of a pastor, and raises his children with the same alienating distance under which he himself was raised.

It took Pontoppidan seven years to reach this point in the narrative, and now midway through he struggled with writer’s block. Among other things, he used the time to edit his earlier writings and to study Nietzsche. What drew him to Nietzsche, also a pastor’s son, was his individualism and his removal of “divine” judgment to the inner life of the human being. This new, modern humanism without external social duties attracted Pontoppidan, who always saw himself as an outsider. Disappointed in his political aspirations for the young Danish democracy, Pontoppidan easily absorbed Nietzsche’s elitist views, which held that the strong person could master his own fate, just as one creates a work of art. The respect that must be won is selfrespect.

Pontoppidan then took his character Lykke-Per down a long, tortuous road, turning the goal of his happiness from the external to the internal, from bliss in a material sense to the liberating suffering of renunciation and to an insight that goes beyond Nietzsche to Arthur Schopenhauer, back to a conception of natural religion. After separating himself from his wife and children and moving to the remotest part of the country in splendid isolation, Per–on the last page of the novel–counts himself lucky for having lived in a time that called upon the instinct “at ville sig selv i guddommelige Nogenhed” (to will oneself in divine nakedness).

For many years Lykke-Per was considered part of the tradition of the Danish fantastroman (dreamer novel), and some scholars have interpreted the ending as an expression of Pontoppidan’s irony. The conclusion has also been interpreted–for example, by Vilhelm Andersen–as an expression of Lykke-Per’s inability to express and receive love. Since the late 1990s, research has focused on understanding Pontoppidan: no longer can anyone find a way around interpreting Lykke-Per as a deeply serious, albeit poetic, philosophical work that does not say things directly but unambiguously points in one direction. These considerations do not change the interpretation of Lykke-Per as a broad, multifaceted description of Denmark and Danish society in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The humor and harsh satire in the novel are components in a tightly woven composition, using leitmotivs and symbolic icons. That Pontoppidan’s struggle with the novel was difficult is also apparent from the fact that, upon completing it, he announced the new 1905 edition and asked that the novel be evaluated on the basis of the later version.

In 1900, during the pause in his work on LykkePer, Pontoppidan published two short novels, Lille Rødhætte (Little Red Riding Hood; republished as Thora van Deken, 1922) and Det ideale Hjem (The Ideal Home). Both are about marriage. Lille Rødhætte is a reworking of a story from Landsbybilleder,“Arv” (Inheritance); in Det ideale Hjem Pontoppidan plays with the idea of a matriarchy in which the children will not be affected by any incompatibility between the parents. The father remains with his sisters and helps to raise the sisters’ children.

During these years Pontoppidan also laid the foundations for three short novels but did not complete them until later: Borgmester Hoeck og Hustru (1905; translated as Burgomaster Hoeck and His Wife, 1999), Det store Spogelse (1907, The Great Apparition), and Den kongelige Gæst (1908; translated as “The Royal Guest,” 1928). In the first and third of these, marriage is either crippled by inner tyranny or shaken to its foundations by an external agent.

Det store Spøgelse, which is also the title of a little fable at the conclusion of Lykke-Per, is quantitatively the smallest of the short novels. The text fulfills the demands of the genre, presenting a novelistic mirror of the sequence of an entire life’s destiny. First and foremost an emblematic text, Det store Spøgelse builds on the sustaining metaphor of Pontoppidan’s entire body of work. “The great apparition” stands for the moral and religious prejudices from the past that should have been rejected by a modern mind. In the story a young servant girl in a village commits suicide out of fear of her master’s condemnation for meeting her boyfriend.

Højsang was dramatized in 1902 as De vilde Fugle (The Wild Birds), but, like its successor, Asgaardsrejen (1906, The Asgaard Shrimp; revised, 1928), the play enjoyed little noteworthy popularity. Neither as a dramatist nor as a poet did Pontoppidan achieve much for his efforts. Hans Kvast og Melusine (1907, Hans Kvast and Melusine), another artist novel, raises the question of whether true art can be created on false premises. The surprising answer is yes. In his journalistic literary criticism Pontoppidan had earlier been preoccupied with what little meaning authenticity has for true art. Hugo Martens is a composer and as full of self-deception as Hjalmar Ekdal in Henrik Ibsen’s Vildanden (1884; translated as The Wild Duck, 1890). This failing, however, does not prevent Martens from composing (after a pathetic suicide attempt) a great and successful musical work during a sea trip along the Norwegian west coast. Hans Kvast og Melusine is the most sarcastic of Pontoppidan’s books, and he once again lent his protagonist some of his own traits.

Pontoppidan later came to compare his last great novel, De Dødes Rige (collected edition, 1917), first published in five separate volumes from 1912 to 1916, to a musical composition, a simple atmospheric motif set for a large orchestra. Although the author does not state this motif, there can be no doubt that it is in a minor key. The melancholy in the description of the lifelong but fruitless love between the title characters in the first volume, Torben og Jytte (1912), is deeper than anywhere else in Pontoppidan’s writings. Manor owner Torben Dihmer is not a protagonist of the same type as Hansted or Lykke-Per. His endeavors, however, lie in the same direction; despite a promising political career and an analytical mind, Torben deliberately allows a fatal but treatable metabolic disease to gain sway over his life and ends up with the same asceticism as Lykke-Per, although with the limited optimism of a broader perspective on natural religion.

Around Torben and Jytte, whose split consciousness is the primary obstacle to the couple’s happiness, Pontoppidan paints a gallery of cultural fools who rush about in search of power, wealth, and honor. He drastically cut the text of the 1917 edition by a quarter, and not necessarily to its advantage, although the structure of the book became clearer. Even more than in his previous novels, Pontoppidan moves about the country and its various environs. De Dødes Rige is not as deep as his two previous major novels, but, with its humor, it etches a picture that does not leave much hope for the development of culture in the shadow of World War I. As Torben observes when he refuses to take over political power in the country, “Vi befinder os paa en Dødssejler, som en skon Dag gaar tilbunds med os allesammen” (We find ourselves on a phantom ship that will one day sink with all of us on board). He describes a nation whose civilization is diseased and dares not realize itself in the divine nakedness that Lykke-Per found. With De Dødes Rige Pontoppidan founded, using the works of Honoré de Balzac and Emile Zola as distant models, the collective satirical novel in Denmark. Preachers, artists, politicians, doctors, businessmen, and women–even those women beloved and worshiped by Pontoppidan–do not escape being stripped of their rationalizations.

As early as Lykke-Per, Pontoppidan had included a portrait of Georg Brandes in his writing. In De Dødes Rige he included a poem for Brandes’s seventieth birthday in 1912 suggesting that the ideals for which the Modern Breakthrough struggled had been deserted, not only by its descendants and camp followers but also by the originators of the movement, who were not so pure of heart that they, in Soren Kierkegaard’s words, willed only one thing. The dominating politician in De Dødes Rige, Enslev, mirrors Brandes’s misguided efforts (in Pontoppidan’s eyes). Despite the deep pessimism of the novel, and despite Pontoppidan’s increasing fear about the end of civilization, he has De Dødes Rige fade into a fragile utopia, set to the reedy tones of the panpipe.

In 1917, when Pontoppidan shared the Nobel Prize in Literature with Gjellerup, he stated that it should have gone to Georg Brandes, who had been proposed for the award several times, but in vain. Some of the Nobel committee members felt that Brandes and Pontoppidan lacked the “idealism” that Gjellerup supposedly possessed. Others, however, felt that Gjellerup was not a strong enough candidate by himself; they had initially considered Jakob Knudsen as a corecipient, but Knudsen died in February 1917, so Pontoppidan succeeded him as a nominee. The shared prize was thus a compromise, though subsequent opinion has been that Pontoppidan was more deserving. The citation for Pontoppidan stated that he received the award “for his authentic descriptions of present-day life in Denmark.” Probably because of the effects of World War I, there was no Nobel ceremony that year, but Pontoppidan and Gjellerup received their prize on 8 November 1917. The award provided the occasion for new marketing, with consequent revised editions of Det forjættede Land and Lykke-Per, less thorough than previous revisions. In 1922 Pontoppidan’s short novels were collected, along with his short stories, into two volumes as Noveller og Skitser: Et Udvalg (Novels and Sketches: A Selection), followed by a third volume in 1930.

Pontoppidan, though lacking “idealism,” was not without a utopian vision. In this mental landscape, the mountaintop is the place for important decisions, and here he takes his characters in Et Kærlighedseventyr (1918, An Amorous Fairy Tale). For the first time he allows a connection between a man and a woman to end happily: between the philosopher and Schopenhauer specialist Gabriel Vadum and Ingrid, the unfaithful wife of a pastor. Between these two, love becomes God. Pontoppidan changed this ending, however, in the second edition of Et Kærlighedseventyr, published in the third volume of Noveller og Skitser, after his wife’s death in 1928. In the revised version Ingrid dies before she and Gabriel can fulfill their love in a lasting life together.

Pontoppidan’s final novel, Mands Himmerig (1927, Man’s Heaven), was undoubtedly better conceived than it was executed. An echo of Enslev in De Dødes Rige, Scholar and newspaperman Niels Thorsen, disappointed in his career, rages first against the Right and then against the Left and ends up in a blind nationalism. On the personal front, he suffers defeat in love when his neglected wife commits suicide. Characters from Asgaardsrejen and Et Kærlighedseventyr reappear in Mands Himmerig, which never achieves the broad overview of Pontoppidan’s large novels or the penetration of his short ones.

During his final thirteen years, Pontoppidan occupied himself primarily with his own life story. The four small volumes of memoirs he published from 1933 to 1940–Drengeaar, Hamskifte, Arv og Gæld, and Familjeliv (1940, Family Life)–and the collected and abridged version, Undervejs til mig selv (1943, On the Way to Myself), appear as a carefully prepared autobiography of a strong artistic character. For example, he introduces a fictional figure, called Schaff, who spiritually guides the young Pontoppidan even before he begins to create. Pontoppidan interprets and organizes his life around a fatalistic belief (Augustine’s “Trahimur” [We are guided]) in a “natural” development.

Once restlessly moving around all over central Europe, Pontoppidan settled down and spent the last fifteen years of his life in a suburb of Copenhagen. He died there on 21 August 1943 after having destroyed all of the drafts, diaries, and letters he could accumulate. For many years his Undervejs til mig selv was the authorized version of his life. Because he was so popular in his lifetime, his works could hardly escape a decline in attention during the 1960s and 1970s, but Pontoppidan has since reemerged as a favorite among readers and critics, who appreciate him for more than his abilities as a painter of “historical” frescoes.

During his entire career Pontoppidan tended to rewrite, correct, abridge, tighten, and alter his texts. As was customary at the time, he presumed that the latest editions would automatically become the authoritative ones. After finishing the second edition of Lykke-Per, published in 1905, Pontoppidan addressed the distinction between the older and newer editions and claimed that the older edition related to the new in exactly the same way that a painter’s nature studies relate to the finished painting. He remarked that one’s preference was a matter of taste: on the one hand, the sketch might have a freshness of color that could not easily be preserved in a more careful composition. On the other hand, the finished painting was likely more accessible, more lucid, and thereby more strongly colored by the artist’s fundamental outlook.

It was, however–and is–not simply a matter of choice with respect to either Det forjættede Land or Lykke-Per: the first editions, in each case consisting of several individual volumes, are not accessible as coherent, integrated works. One may choose the collected 1898 edition of Det forjættede Land and that of 1905 for Lykke-Per, or the further revised, collected editions of each from 1918. Today, most scholars prefer the former, but the latter are now in print in paperback. No single official policy exists among Pontoppidan’s heirs and the various publishers of his works: Gyldendal, Det danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab (The Danish Language and Literature Association), and the Pontoppidan Society. Different editions are used for different reasons. No collected, critical edition of Pontoppidan’s works exists. Despite comprehensive plans, only Det forjættede Land has been published in a critical edition (1997) by Det danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab. Several of the smaa Romaner have been reprinted (from the first editions) by Det danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab and equipped with explanatory notes and afterwords. Regardless of which editions are primary, Henrik Pontoppidan’s work continues to endure.

Letters

Henrik Pontoppidan og Georg Brandes, volume 1: En dokumentarisk redegørelse for brevvekslingen og den personlige kontakt, edited by Elias Bredsdorff (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1964);

Henrik Pontoppidans Breve, 2 volumes, edited by Bredsdorff and Carl Erik Bay (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1997).

Interviews

C. C. Clausen, “Henrik Pontoppidan,” Hver ottende Dag, 11 (10 September 1905): 792–794;

Anonymous, “Henrik Pontoppidan om Lykke-Per,” Politiken (19 December 1905): 4;

Carl Henrik Clemmensen, as Clerk, “Henrik Pontoppidan om Georg Brandes,” Nationaltidende, 21 February 1927, p. 1;

Clemmensen, “Henrik Pontoppidan om sig selv,” Nationaltidende, 23 July 1927, pp. 1-2.

Bibliography

Poul Carit Andersen, Henrik Pontoppidan: En Biografi og Bibliografi (Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaard, 1934).

References

Knut Ahnlund, Henrik Pontoppidan: Fem huvudlinjer i författerskapet (Stockholm: Nordstedt, 1956);

Ahnlund, ed., Omkring Lykke-Per: En studiebog (Copenhagen: H. Reitzel, 1971);

Vilhelm Andersen, Henrik Pontoppidan: Et nydansk Forfatterskab (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1917);

Flemming Behrendt, ed., Undergangens angst–De Dødes Rige, Pontoppidan Selskabets Skriftserie, 3, no. 1 (Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 2004);

Frederik J. Billeskov Jansen, Henrik Pontoppidan: Ledetråd for læsere (Copenhagen: Nordisk Forlag, 1978);

Georg Brandes, “Henrik Pontoppidan,” in his Fugleperspektiv (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1913), pp. 1–21;

Elias Bredsdorff, Henrik Pontoppidan og Georg Brandes, volume 2: En kritisk undersørgelse of Henrik Pontoppidans forhold til Georg Brandes og Brandes-linjen i danskånd sliv (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1964);

Ernst Ekman, “Henrik Pontoppidan as a Critic of Modern Danish Society,” Scandinavian Studies, 29 (1957): 170–183;

Henrik Pontoppidan-Portal for læsere, studerende, læsere og forskere <http://www.henrikpontoppidan.dk>

Bent Haugaard Jeppesen, Henrik Pontoppidans samfundskritik: Studier over den sociale debat i forfatterskabet,1881-1927 (Copenhagen: Gad, 1962; enlarged edition, Copenhagen: Vinten, 1977);

Niels Kofoed, Henrik Pontoppidan: Anarkismen og demokratiets tragedie (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1986);

P. M. Mitchell, Henrik Pontoppidan (Boston: Twayne, 1979);

Klaus P. Mortensen, Ironi og utopi: En bog om Henrik Pontoppidan (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1982);

H. P. Rohde, Det lyder som et eventyr–og andre Henrik Pontoppidan–studier (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1981);

Hakon Stangerup and F. J. Billeskov Jansen, Fra Georg Brandes til Johannes V. Jensen, volume 4 of Dansk litteraturhistorie, edited by P. H. Traustedt (Copenhagen: Politiken, 1977);

Ejnar Thomsen, ed., Henrik Pontoppidan til Minde (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1944);

Karl V. Thomsen, Hold galden flydende. Tanker og tendenser i Henrik Pontoppidans forfatterskab (Århus: S. Lund, 1957);

Jørgen E. Tiemroth, Det labyrintiske Sind. Henrik Pontoppidans forfatterskab, 1881-1904 (Odense: Odense University Press, 1986);

Tiemroth, Maskespil (Odense: Odense University Press, 1988).