Norwegian Literature - Emigration Literature

Emigration Literature

Although a side note to the mainstream of Norwegian literature, the literature which documents the experience of Norwegian emigrants to America is as important as the Norwegian immigrants became to the growing America of the 19th century. Three authors are recognized in this genre; Ole Rølvaag wrote about immigrants, while Johan Bojer and Ingeborg Refling Hagen wrote about emigrants. Ole E. Rølvaag, who immigrated to America, experienced life in the prairies, and rose to become professor of Norwegian at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, provided a strong record of the joys and pains of the immigrant in adapting to the harsh realities of and carving out a new life in a wild new country. Norwegian author Johan Bojer provided a mirror image, depicting the struggles and processes which led to the decisions to emigrate. Ingeborg Refling Hagen, having two brothers and a sister in the United States contemplated the emigrant's longing for home and their harsh struggle "over there" in a known collection of emigrant poems from 1935.