Tage Skou-Hansen won international acclaim with the publication of his first novel, De nøgne træer (1957; translated as The Naked Trees, 1959), which deals with the German occupation of Denmark from 1940 to 1945. The book was published in many countries in both the East and the West. At the same time, this debut novel laid the groundwork for a career that has made Skou-Hansen one of the most prominent literary commentators of the latter half of the twentieth century and also won him a place among the most important contemporary novelists in Denmark.

Skou-Hansen's work is primarily concerned with the crisis-filled transition from the modern to the postmodernist or late-modernist period, although these general labels of specific epochs do not do full justice to his concerns. Skou-Hansen's work digs deep and questions the attempt to distinguish between the universal and that which is typical of a specific...