Pelle the Conqueror

Martin Andersen Nexo, the first prominent voice in Danish literature of trade unionism and proletarian solidarity, spent an impoverished youth working at various trades in Copenhagen and on the island of Bornholm. After 1901 he supported himself by writing. A communist and zealous enemy of injustice, he avoided arrest during the Nazi occupation in World War II by fleeing, first to Sweden and then to the Soviet Union. He died in East Germany. Pelle the Conqueror (1906-10) and Ditte (1917-21) are Nexo's classic proletarian novels. Pelle describes the childhood of a poor farm lad and his later activities as a union organizer in Copenhagen. Ditte charts the struggle of a young woman against poverty and cold indifference. Differing rather sharply from Pelle, the novel describes the woman's fate in basic moral terms, not as the outcome of political events.

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