Jan Fridegård was the son of statare (estate-workers), farm laborers in Sweden tied to large working estates and earning their wages mostly in kind (stat). His family, like all statare families, was poor, semiliterate, and socially immobile, brutalized by a system that arose in the eighteenth century to support the landed aristocracy. That system pervades Fridegård's work, and his early writings depicting it and the lives of other lower-class working people put Fridegård in the center of a major literary movement in Sweden. Greatly influenced by such authors as Anton Chekhov, Maxim Gorky, Jack London, and Upton Sinclair and coming from a repressive background, Fridegård was well equipped to join his Swedish colleagues writing autobiographical novels about the horrible conditions under which thousands lived. Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson, for example, who jointly won the Nobel Prize in literature in...