Ivar Lo-Johansson

Born Feb. 23, 1901, in Osmo. Swedish writer. Son of a farmhand.

Lo-Johansson was a lumberjack and a mason and subsequently became a journalist. His first books were Life of a Tramp in France (1927) and Stories About One Shift (1928). In the 1930’s and 1940’s, Lo-Johansson wrote the novels Good Night, Earth (1933) and Only a Mother (1939; Russian translation, 1969) and the short story collections The Statare (vols. 1-2, 1936-37) and Proletarians of the Earth (1941), all of which were in the tradition of what was called the statare school (from statare, “landless peasant”); they depict the difficult life of farmhands.

Lo-Johansson published a cycle of autobiographical novellas: The Illiterate (1951), The Peddler (1953), The Inhabitant of Stockholm (1954), The Journalist (1956), The Writer (1951), The Socialist (1958), The Soldier (1959), and The Proletarian Writer (1960). In these works Lo-Johansson presents a realistic and broad panorama of the life of Swedish society in the second half of the 20th century. The collections of novellas that make up the cycle of “human passions” (Love, 1968; The Misers, 1969; The Careerists, 1969; The Sensualists, 1970; and The Fibbers, 1971) attest to Lo-Johansson’s search for new themes and new art forms.