A vast and rich account of the peasant immigrants who settled throughout America.

Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie

Literature & Fiction

Rolvaag, O.E.

Contemporary

Harper&Row

Peder Victorious, the sequel to Rölvaag's massive Giants in the Earth, continues the saga of the Norwegian settlers in the Dakotas. Here again, years later, are all the sturdy pioneers of the earlier novel, Rölvaag's "vikings of the prairie"—Per Hansa's Beret and their children, Syvert Tönseten and Kjersti, and Sörine. The great struggle against the land itself has been won. Now there is to be a second struggle, a struggle to adapt, to become Americans.The development of the Spring Creek settlement in these years is manifested in the rebellious growing up of Peder Victorious. Peder is a beautiful and moving novel of youth and youth's self-discovery. It is the story, too, of Beret's pain and dismay at the Americanization of her children, what Rölvaag described as the true tragedy of the immigrants, who made their children part of a world to which they themselves could never belong.Out of the inevitable conflict between the first-generation American and his still Norwegian mother, Rölvaag built a powerful novel of personal growth, guilt, and victory.

Peder Victorious: A Tale of the Pioneers Twenty Years Later

United States

Bison Books

Susie Doheny, an Irish Catholic, and Peder Holm, a Norwegian Lutheran, fall in love and marry in South Dakota in the 1890s. Soon their marriage is tested by drought, depression, and family bickering. Susie believes they are being tested by their fathers' God. 
Peder blames Susie for the timidity of her beliefs; Susie fears Peder's pride and skepticism. When political antagonism grows between the Norwegian and Irish immigrant communities, it threatens to split their marriage.
Against a backdrop of hard times, crisscrossed by Populists, antimonopolists, and schemers, Rölvaag brings the struggle of immigrants into the twentieth century. In Giants in the Earth the Holm family strained to wrest a homestead from the land. In Peder Victorious the American-born children searched for a new national identity, often defying the traditions their parents fought to uphold. In Their Fathers' God, Rölvaag's most soul-searching novel, the first-generation americans enter a world of ruthless competition in the midst of scarcity. 
The University of Nebraska Press also publishes Peder Victorious and Paul Reigstad's Rölvaag: His Life and Art.

Their Fathers' God (Bison Book S)

Rølvaag, Ole Edvart

Product Description 
The classic story of a Norwegian pioneer family's struggles with the land and the elements of the Dakota Territory as they try to make a new life in America. 
 Review 
"The fullest, finest, and most powerful novel that has been written about pioneer life in America."-- "The Nation""A moving narrative of pioneer hardship and heroism...The background of the boundless Dakota prairie, with its mysterious distances and its capacity for evil, is painted with alternating beauty and grimness."-- "Atlantic Monthly""That in "Giants in the Earth" this NorwegianAmerican immigrant has made a distinct contribution to the literature of two countries there is no doubt...It has a bare simplicity which is cumulative in effectiveness."-- "New York Times""A firmly woven tapestry of harsh texture wrought by a master sure in his choice of strong fiber and of color, telling with heroic gesture and intricate design its legend of simple people struggling in the eternal coil of unwitting life."-- "Times Literary Supplement" (London)

Giants in the Earth (Perennial Classics)

Rolvaag, OLE E

Rlvaag, O E

Literary

Turtleback Books

From the rocky, mist-enshrouded shores of Norway to the bustling streets of Minneapolis, O. E. Rølvaag lyrically chronicles the experiences of Nils Vaag, a young Norwegian immigrant. Abandoning the life of a fisherman in Nordland, a region poor but full of mystical beauty, Nils emigrates to the New World in 1912. There he sweeps saloons, lives in a boardinghouse called "Babel" for the many languages used by its residents, and begins to find his way among the people of the city. The Boat of Longing was Rølvaag's favorite of all his books and the only one set in urban America. When it was first published in English in 1933, it received wide praise from American critics. This edition includes an introduction by Einar Haugen, professor emeritus of Scandinavian and Linguistics at Harvard University and author of a critical study of Rølvaag.

The Boat of Longing (Borealis Books)

Minnesota Historical Society Press

The Third Life of Per Smevik

Dillon Press

Giants in the Earth

Classics

Digireads.com

Originally published in the Nordlandsk dialect of northern Norway. CORRECT TITLE IS: Their Fathers' God. Published by Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1931.

Their Father's God

Genre Fiction

harper bros

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