Utvandrarna Reading Order

Utvandrarna (The Emigrants, 1949) by Vilhelm Moberg is the first volume of his Emigrant Novels tetralogy — one of the great sagas of Swedish fiction, tracing a group of Swedish peasants from the Småland province who emigrate to Minnesota in the 1850s. Moberg, himself the descendant of Swedish emigrants, spent years researching the Swedish-American immigrant experience in archives on both sides of the Atlantic, and the result is a work of extraordinary historical vividness: the terrible conditions of Swedish peasant life, the harsh Atlantic crossing, and the shock of arrival in a country whose language and customs are entirely foreign. The central characters are Karl Oskar Nilsson and his wife Kristina, a farm couple driven to emigration by poverty, crop failure, and the death of a child — and their companions, including Karl Oskar's brother Robert, who has been brutalized by a cruel master and dreams of gold in California, and the lay preacher Danjel Andreasson, who leads his congregation to the New World in the conviction that the established Lutheran church has abandoned true Christianity. The tetralogy follows these characters from their departure to their deaths in the new land, and it remains the fullest fictional treatment of the Scandinavian emigration to America — which between 1850 and 1930 sent more than a million Swedes to the United States.