Lindgren, Astrid (1907—)

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Lindgren, Astrid (1907—)

Swedish writer who is especially famous for her "Pippi Longstocking" series. Born Astrid Ericsson in Vimmerby, Sweden, on November 14, 1907; daughter of Hanna (Jonsson) Ericsson and Samuel August Ericsson (both farmers); married Sture Lindgren, on April 4, 1931 (died 1952); children: (prior to her marriage) one son, Lars; Karin Lindgren (b. 1934, who married Carl Olof Nyman).

Awards:

Nils Holgersson Medal (1950); Deutscher Jugendbuchpreis (1956); The Swedish State Award for Writers of High Literary Standard (1957); Hans Christian Andersen Medal; Boys' Club of America Junior Book Award (1958); New York Herald Tribune Children's Spring Book Festival Award (1959); Golden Ship Award of the Swedish Society for the Promotion of Literature; Expressen's Heffaklumpa Award; Lewis Carroll Shelf Award (1970); Swedish Academy's Gold Medal (1971); The Dutch Silver Pen Award (1975); Adelaide-Risto Award; International Writer's Prize; honorary doctor of letters, Leicester University, England (1979); Mildred L. Batchelder Award to Viking Press; John Hansson Award (1984); Gold Medal awarded by the Swedish Government; Silver Bear Award, Berlin; French Children's Book Award; the Karen Blixen Award; Jovanovic Zmaj Award (1985); the Selma Lagerlof Award (1986); the Leo Tolstoy International Gold Medal (1987).

Other prizes honoring her humanitarian activities:

The Peace Prize of the German Booksellers' Association (1978); The Janusz Korczak Prize (1979); The Dag Hammarskjöld Award (1984); The Albert Schweitzer Medal (1989).

Selected works translated into English:

Pippi Longstocking (1945); The Children of Noisy Village (1947); Bill Bergson Lives Dangerously (1951); Mio, Mio, My Son (1954); Karlsson-on-the-Roof (1955); Rasmus and the Vagabond (1956); Mischievous Meg (1959); Emil in the Soup Tureen (1963); The Brothers Lionheart (1973); Ronia, the Robber's Daughter (1981).

In 1941, at the beginning of the Second World War, Astrid Lindgren told stories at the bedside of her seven-year-old daughter Karin who was suffering from pneumonia. When, out of nowhere, Karin asked her mother to tell a tale about Pippi Longstocking (Pippi Laangstrump), Lindgren did not ask who Pippi was; she just supplied a story about the girl on request. Pippi, with her great name, turned out to be a most extraordinary girl who delighted Karin and her friends so much that she had to be kept alive in repeated and succeeding stories. Three years later, in the early spring of 1944, Lindgren slipped on the icy streets of Stockholm and sprained her ankle. To pass the time until she regained her mobility, she started writing down the stories of Pippi Longstocking. In the process, an author was born.

Lindgren has repeatedly stressed that she had a wondrous childhood. She grew up in a wooden house, old and red, which was surrounded by apple trees on a farm in Näs, outside the small town of Vimmerby, in Smaland, Sweden. With her three siblings, one brother and two sisters, she lived a life of both freedom and security, climbing trees and roaming the countryside. Their safety was undergirded by their parents' close relationship and the local traditions sustained by their culture and husbandry. The Ericsson children, however, did more than play, taking their turns at chores on the farm, where life was hard. Smaland's soil is stony, and, for many, hunger and starvation were steady companions. Astrid and her siblings grew up with people of all sorts and ages, from whom she learned "without their knowing it and without my knowing it—something about life's demands and how hard it can be to be a human being."

Lindgren's writing would tap into her early experiences which produced both a sense of belonging and a sensitivity to the beauty of nature around her: the "mounds of strawberries … meadows full of cowslips, bilberry patches, woods with the pink bells of linnea in the moss, the pastures round Näs, the water-lilies in the streams, ditches, slopes and trees." While she would grow up, like most children, to learn that people can be fickle, cruel and careless, nature never let her down. Her pastoral descriptions—persuasive to children who can relate to the notion that "stones and trees" can be "as close to [them] as living beings"—are among the most powerful passages in her books. Throughout her life, the natural world which "sheltered and nourished [the Ericsson children's] games and dreams," has provided Lindgren both with an escape from civilized life and all its vices, and with the impetus to support ecological and animal-rights issues. Lindgren has called herself a "little animal sucking in only that which was nature" who became a human being when she heard her first fairy tale. This event fueled her awareness of the power of words and the world of the imagination. An inveterate reader, she would become a storyteller (earning the nickname of "Vimmerby's Selma Lagerlöf "), whose tales reflect the rootedness of her own childhood. The care and trust in life established in her

rural community lend to her stories an undercurrent of stability and confidence which makes even hazardous adventures and gnarly problems manageable. With an understanding of a child's attraction to chaos restored to order, and of the desire to encounter the scary and subdue it, Lindgren addresses existential anxieties in her novels, such as loneliness and feelings of worthlessness, despite an emphasis on adventure and playfulness. The Brothers Lionheart, one of her last novels, deals with the inevitability of death and its occurrence even in childhood.

"A biography of Astrid Lindgren should end with the end of her childhood," writes her primary biographer, Margareta Stromstedt , who has been permitted a closer look at the writer than anyone else. Lindgren is known to treat journalists with kindness and interest in their affairs, but they often leave after a long and pleasant conversation only to realize they have been talking about themselves and have come away knowing nothing new about the author. She tells only what she wants to—and generally the same things.

A child, alone with his book, creates for himself, somewhere in the secret recesses of the soul, his own pictures which surpass all else. Such pictures are necessary for humanity.
—Astrid Lindgren

Lindgren has described her teens as a mere "state" without "tone or vitality." She succumbed to melancholy, thinking herself ugly and unable to fall in love despite a desire to do so. She developed a measure of independence during these years even in her relationship to her mother, the formidable Hanna. Astrid liked dancing, both folk dances and jazz, and she refused to stay home like a good farmer's daughter. Instead, she stayed out nights, later and more often than her mother sanctioned. At 17, when she called her father to say she had cut her hair, he suggested she not hurry home. On her eventual arrival there, she sat down on a chair in the kitchen, and no one said a word; they only walked about her in silence. Astrid endured it because, with her new bob, she felt less unattractive, and she caused quite a sensation in the little town of Vimmerby.

She graduated in 1923 from the local secondary school with good grades, especially in Swedish, at age 16. Astrid then took a job almost immediately at the local newspaper, Vimmerby Tidningen, where she did copy editing and wrote reviews and articles of local interest, including conferences, weddings and funerals. In 1926, when she was 19, she learned she was pregnant. In a small town like Vimmerby, such an event threatened to crush both her and her respected family. Astrid's determination to not marry the father of the expected child made matters even worse. "Never have so many gossiped about so little—at least not in Vimmerby," was her laconic comment. Wholly unwilling to stay at home, she left for Stockholm.

To make a living, she enrolled in a typing and short-hand course, but her advancing pregnancy forced her to seek help. The attorney Eva Anden , who belonged to a group of politically radical working women with a special interest in unwed mothers and women laborers, learned that Astrid had no one even to talk to because she was determined to deal with the predicament on her own. Anden arranged for her to go to Copenhagen, where she could deliver her baby at the state hospital, and found a place for her to stay until the time of delivery, which took place shortly before Christmas. Astrid was forced to give Lars, her son, up, but fortunate in that the family with whom she had stayed while awaiting his birth offered to take him in as a foster child. She subsequently returned to Stockholm and her studies. "Lars was fine during those years, but I was not," she would later recall. She missed him son terribly. The following year (1927), she finished her classes and landed a job as a private secretary. Without unions, office women, who had to pay for room and board on low wages, often went hungry in the 1920s. Astrid saved what she could for transportation to Copenhagen to see her son as often as possible, which was rarely.

In December 1929, she learned that Lars' foster mother was ill and could no longer care for him. Astrid brought him to Stockholm with her, and her landlady watched him while she was at work. His five-month stay there was a trying time, especially because he suffered from whooping cough which kept both son and mother awake at night. In May, Astrid finally brought him home to Näs where, as her mother put it, he really belonged.

Lars' life with his grandparents, aunts and uncle came to an end in 1931 when Astrid married her boss, Sture Lindgren. He was an executive with the royal Swedish Automobile Club where she worked writing travelogues and motoring guides. The three of them moved into an apartment in Stockholm, and when their daughter Karin was born in 1934, Astrid became a full-time mother. She also did occasional freelance work as a stenographer which earned her a little money; more significantly, however, it offered valuable information and insights. A job with Harry Soderman, professor in criminology at a Stockholm institute, not only taught her enough about the technicalities of crime to write a book about a master detective, but also gave her forewarnings about the rise of the National Socialist Party in Germany and Hitler's persecution of Jews. Prompted by increasing anxiety, she started a war diary on September 1, 1939, admitting that until that day she had avoided "hoarding" but now had bought such items as cocoa, tea and a little soap. Lindgren kept writing throughout the war years, and her loathing

of Hitler and his regime runs like a red thread through her diary entries.

Early in the war, Soderman got her a job censoring letters in Sweden's Intelligence Service. Through the reading of these letters, she came to know war from individuals who reported losses in terms of family and friends. She both felt their anguish and recognized how fortunate was her family of four. In 1941, following Sture's promotion, the Lindgrens had moved to a larger apartment, and they, like numerous other Swedes, could spend summers in the Stockholm archipelago. Lindgren's conviction that an individual's demonstration of care and responsibility must be commensurate with her power and good fortune prompted her to become an active participant in the efforts to rescue displaced Jews.

In May 1944, Lindgren presented her daughter Karin with the Pippi Longstocking manuscript as a birthday gift. She then sent a copy to Bonniers, the largest publishing house in Sweden, which rejected it. Lindgren entered The Confidences of Britt-Mari, a more traditional book, in a competition sponsored by a smaller publishing firm, Raben & Sjogren, and it took second prize. In 1945, a revised Pippi took first prize, and Raben & Sjogren published the manuscript, which set Lindgren on the road to fame and put the publishers in the black. Pippi Goes on Board followed in 1946, and 1948 saw the last of the series, Pippi in the South Seas. In 1946, Lindgren had become editor and head of the children's book department at Raben & Sjogren, a position she held until 1970. During her 24 years there, she wrote in the mornings at home, producing books, radio plays and film manuscripts (Pippi was broadcast on Swedish radio in 1946, the first feature film was made in 1949, and since then three more Swedish adaptations have appeared), as well as theater adaptations and lectures. Afternoons were spent at her editing job, and evenings with her family. From the late 1940s to the 1970s, she wrote at least one book a year, many of which have been translated into several languages. Lindgren's literary voice, which both entertains and encourages children to question and think for themselves, is unmistakable.

After a long illness, Sture Lindgren died in 1952. Astrid and her daughter stayed on together in their apartment until Karin married and left home. Lindgren, who did not remarry, was content in her privacy and quiet existence. After repeatedly voicing her desire to live in peace and away from publicity, to the surprise of many she launched a public protest in the 1970s. As an uncomplaining taxpayer who had sought no tax shelter abroad and invested in no foreign domiciles, she grew furious in March 1976 when a 102% tax was levied on her income. Realizing that such steep taxes likely affected others who were much less affluent, Lindgren wrote a scathing critique against the Social Democratic government in the guise of a satirical fairy tale. She attacked the bureaucratized, self-serving party apparatus whose leaders by this time ceased to resemble the activists of the early days of the social democratic movement in Sweden. Lindgren would have been proud to join them back when they had fought for the rights of the underprivileged; in their absence, she supported the party's demise. Her fairy tale, which tested her supposition that many others were equally dissatisfied with the government, found a wide readership and caused a debate which brought to an end the 40-year rule of the Social Democrats in Sweden.

In 1985, Lindgren took on the government again, this time with open letters to the minister of agriculture protesting the mistreatment of farm animals. In letter after letter, she spoke out against legalized and institutionalized cruelty towards domestic animals based on greed and shortsightedness. Objectifying such creatures by treating them as production units, she argued, would guarantee their continual suffering. She urged that a basic respect for life be maintained in large-scale operations as well as on individual farms. The major Stockholm newspapers printed her submissions, and three years of concerted efforts on her part resulted in Lex Lindgren, the Animal Protection Act, promulgated in June 1988.

Lindgren receives letters from all over the world where children have read her books. The Pippi books have been translated into 56 languages, and a total of 40 million are in circulation. Four million copies have been sold in Germany alone. Critics have noted that Pippi's initial popularity was partly owed to the fact that she was a symbol of freedom to the overly protected and strictly monitored middle-class children of the 1940s. (She is thus declared a prototype of the progressive and reformist school in pedagogy inspired by the writings of Ellen Key , Alexander Sutherland Neill, and Bertrand Russell.) While that may be true, it is also true that child-rearing practices have since changed drastically, and Pippi has lost none of her popularity. "Her superhuman qualities," writes Eva-Maria Metcalf , "make her an ideal outlet for readers' compensatory fantasies." Lindgren herself reminds us that Pippi's will to power is invariably a will to do good. Even as she outsmarts teachers and professors, and ridicules narrow-mindedness and conceit, she is a caring and compassionate character.

Now in her 90s, Lindgren remains actively engaged despite impaired eyesight, which has left her virtually blind. Both her modest life and her work document her concern for the welfare of all life, and especially for those who are likely victims of the abuse of power because they cannot speak up for themselves.