Gunnar Gunnarsson has often been called a Danish-Icelandic author, and in fact he belongs to Danish literary history as well as Icelandic, as the bulk of his work was written first in Danish. In the first half of the twentieth century his popularity among Scandinavian readers was unsurpassed by any of his countrymen. In Germany, only the Norwegian Knut Hamsun rivaled his stature as the leading Nordic writer. Moreover, several of his novels were translated into English between World War I and World War II.

Gunnar Gunnarsson was born at the farm and parsonage of Valþjófsstadur in Fljótsdalur in eastern Iceland on 18 May 1889. His parents, Gunnar Helgi Gunnarsson and Katrín Þórarinsdóttir, lived there in the household of Gunnar's paternal uncle, Sigurdur Gunnarsson. When Gunnar was two years old, his parents moved to the small farm of...