When Henrik 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...

RENOUNCING RELIGION gave the intellectuals of the Modern Breakthrough in late nineteenth-century Scandinavia a hard time. Not only did they thereby contest the entire establishment of Christian authorities in various sectors of society, but they also had to fight their own religious inclinations....

FOR LACK of a translation, (1) one of the greatest novels of European literature from the end of the nineteenth century has remained unread by the English-speaking world, its author virtually unknown. Yet Henrik Pontoppidan's Lykke Per (1898-1904; Lucky Per), early rendered into...