In his native Denmark, Hans Scherfig is remembered as one of his generation's polymaths. In addition to being an influential novelist, he was also a preeminent painter of naivistic oils and watercolors, an amateur naturalist of note, and a widely read journalist.

Scherfig began his artistic career as a largely self-taught painter of unspoiled nature scenes, and turned his hand to writing in part by accident, in part by necessity. From his childhood, Scherfig harbored a great love for literature. He was as well read in the classics as he was in the prose and poetry of his Danish contemporaries. As a young man in the 1920s and 1930s, he composed several poems which, for the most part, have remained unpublished. He also wrote movie reviews and opinion pieces for various periodicals during that time. To help meet expenses in the early 1930s while he continued to paint...