Hjalmar Bergman wrote his most important works in the 1910s and early 1920s. Works such as En döds memoarer (Memoirs of a Dead Man, 1918), which concentrates on different kinds of spiritual death; the "farewell" novels Markurells i Wadköping (1919; translated as God's Orchid, 1924), Herr von Hancken (1920), and Farmor och Vår Herre (Grandma and the Good Lord, 1921; translated as Thy Rod and Thy Staff, 1937); and the autobiographical novel Jag, Ljung och Medardus (Ljung, Medardus, and I, 1923) have established Bergman as one of the greatest Swedish writers and the greatest psychologist in Swedish twentieth-century literature. Much like his contemporaries, Bergman describes social reality in a provincial town, with its growing industrialism and social reconstruction, from a middle-class perspective; but while most of his contemporaries, influenced by the French philosopher Henri Bergson, believed in man's free will and ability to shape his own life, Bergman was...