Recommendations
Books Like Utvandrarna (The Emigrants) by Vilhelm Moberg
Scandinavian emigrant fiction, immigrant sagas, and novels of leaving and arriving
If Utvandrarna (The Emigrants) moved you with Karl Oskar and Kristina's departure from Småland and their slow making of a home in Minnesota, these eight works share its attention to the immigrant experience, the costs of emigration, and the survival of people displaced from the world that formed them.
- 1Buy on Amazon
Unto a Good Land (Invandrarna)
by Vilhelm Moberg
Volume 2 of the Emigrant tetralogy — the arrival in Minnesota and the building of the farm; the essential continuation of The Emigrants and the most moving account of Swedish-American settlement.
- 2
Buy on AmazonMy Ántonia
by Willa Cather
The Bohemian immigrant Ántonia Shimerda's life on the Nebraska prairie — the most celebrated American account of the immigrant farmer's experience, directly parallel to Karl Oskar and Kristina's Minnesota.
- 3
Buy on AmazonGiants in the Earth
by Ole Edvart Rølvaag
The Norwegian equivalent of The Emigrants — Per Hansa and Beret's settlement on the Dakota prairie in the 1870s; the most psychologically penetrating account of Scandinavian immigrant experience in American fiction.
- 4
Buy on AmazonGrowth of the Soil
by Knut Hamsun
The Norwegian counterpart — where Moberg's emigrants build in the New World, Hamsun's Isak builds in Norway; the same patient labor of clearing, plowing, and establishing a farm that gives life meaning.
- 5Buy on Amazon
The House on the Prairie (Little House series)
by Laura Ingalls Wilder
The pioneer's-daughter account of the same Minnesota and Dakota settlement world the Emigrant Novels depict — a different perspective but the same land and the same challenges of building in an empty country.
- 6
Buy on AmazonAmerica Is in the Heart
by Carlos Bulosan
The great Filipino-American immigration memoir — Bulosan's passage from the Philippines to California's agricultural labor camps in the 1930s; the immigrant's disillusionment with the America he had been promised.
- 7
Buy on AmazonThe Jungle
by Upton Sinclair
Lithuanian immigrants in Chicago's meatpacking industry — the dark face of the immigrant dream that Moberg's Karl Oskar never encounters; what the New World withholds from those who arrive without capital.
- 8
Buy on AmazonKristin Lavransdatter
by Sigrid Undset
Undset's medieval Norwegian trilogy — the Old World that Moberg's emigrants left behind; reading both gives the sweep of Norwegian and Swedish life from the fourteenth century to the nineteenth.
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