Axel Jensen entered the literary scene in the 1950s with several autobiographical works in the Beat tradition. Over the course of his career he fostered the reputation of a wandering writer who keenly felt the emptiness of middle-class life and was constantly searching for higher meaning. Today his fans remember him as the European bohemian par excellence--a vagabond, an outsider, an esoteric master of language, a rebel seeking freedom from social conventions and the sleepwalk of bourgeois existence. Toward the end of his life Jensen was a political activist--in the late 1980s and 1990s he was a staunch defender of Salman Rushdie and the right to free speech and a supporter of Norwegian accession to the European Union. Jensen received many prestigious awards and honors for both his literary and political efforts, and his many fans and admirers created an "Axel Jensen--dagene" (Axel Jensen Days) festival first held...